All,

First of all, apologies if I have missed another post on this issue (a few simple searches did not bring up anything relevant).

I am the lucky owner of a 2020 model C45 that is berthed in Greece (sails part of the year as a charter boat). For the 2020 model Bavaria returned to the control panel with buttons rather than the fancy touchscreen system (which may or may not be releavant to this issue).

Ever since the boat was brand new we have had issues with the bow thruster. In particular, it flags up a low voltage alarm on the helm controller after a couple of seconds of use – and then stops the thruster completely. At this point the only return is to turn off the controller and turn it back again.

We have seen that the current use of the thruster motor is quite extreme (up to 700 amp moving the thruster control fully out). As such it clearly has a significant drain on the thruster battery. In order to improve the situation we installed a high performance Lithium Ion battery with significant current drain capacity.

However, the issue remains the same. The thruster starts working and a second or two later it flags up the low voltage alarm and stops. This is the case with 100% charged battery.

In other words, the bow thruster is completely useless.  In the charter fleet, similar issues have been seen on other C45s and C50s, including different model years (albeit not always manifesting itself exactly in the same way).

Do any of you have any experience with this issues – and possibly even have suggestions for how to proceed on making the bow thruster useful?

All the best

Jan