Motor/esc cooling setup-whats best tubing route?

[JIM MARCUM]

My rudders have 2 hole H2O pickups & my boat has 2 outlets. My Castle Hydra has 4 intake tubes, the Leopard 5692 motor has 1 in 1 out. There are a lot of ways to "Y" the coolant tubing to the ESC & motor. I've been using 1 intake/outlet for the motor & one split & looped for the ESC. Questions: 1. Is this single pickup good enough to cool the ESC? 2. Do I need to add more pickup tubes? THX, JIM

[norbique]

i'm courious too...

[m4a1usr]

The water pick up should always be routed thru the esc first, then the motor. If you have two pickups you could run one thru your esc and the other thru your motor. Each would see about an equal amount to water flow. I have a speedmaster rudder with 2 pickups. But I run both rudder inlets to a "Y" or "T" connector into my esc and then motor. But before you go off and make assumptions I am one who does not believe that a water cooled motor is of huge importance. Personally I dont think water cooling to a motor jacket offers any significant performance over a motor without that has been properly selected for the load and hull type. Since almost all the heat a motor generates will be effectively located in the windings a motor jacket or what is known in the real world as a shell cooler only has the ability to pull heat away from the outer most portion. A water cooling jacket cannot remove any heat from the center portion of the stator nor any amount of heat from the rotor. Copper can get hot and return back to its normal state once cooled. Generally speaking. The magnets in your rotor will degrade if they get too hot. They will not return back to normal. Matter of fact they will get worse with each successive run. Eventually destroying the motor.

If you know how to size the load on your motor you do not need water cooling. Its literally ineffective for our applications since we run for so little time. Oh well. So much for advice. Just my 2 cents for what its worth.

John

[norbique]

Thanks for the input! Much appreciated.

[tanasit]

I give an extra attention to cool the ESC, thus I always add another cooling plate to the ESC.
Moreover you can buy a cooling fin that goes inline between the ESC and the motor. On my Pursuit I even add a cooling plate between the ESC and the motor and placed the plate to the bottom of the hull with thermal grease. Extra cooling won't hurt.
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[norbique]

This bottom of the hull thing reminded me of something.
I saw some boats that had a metal plate built right into the bottom of the hull. The plate touched water directly on the outside. On the iside of the plate one could cool down water inside the hull, between the ESC and motor for example.