Just Back

Just had a lightening trip down to Maine to see the boatbuilder and see what has been happening. Its always a bit of a pressure cooker getting time off work and loads of driving. The boat shed is of course an interesting place with many of the local characters "floating in" to see whats going on. Bills is obviously highly respected and his work is impeccable.. Always time for a chat, exchanging info and indeed one of the guys was installing a Cape Horn windvane exactly like mine. Great chat and great camaraderie.

The panel is fully wired and what a dandy job Dave has done, his work is so neat and he is really pleased with it and so am I. Recent additions are switches for two electric bilge pumps both of which are directly wired to the batteries. One comes from the head and the other from the aft bilge, this one has an alarm connected as an early warning system. Expensive these alarms so one should be enough which is of course at the deepest bilge point.

There are three switches just above the bilge pumps and these are the battery mains for house engine and then a connector which will allow both to come on stream in case of problems.

I think Dave has put a lot of thought into how it all goes together so that an electrical neophyte like me can interpret problems at a later date. Batteries are installed too, three AGMs as the house for about 320 Ah. They should accept a fast charge either from the shore charger source or from the high output alternator, coupled with the Ample Power V3 and all temp controlled at the battery.

The challenge is to get the system balanced, generally the batts will be charged to 85% (from the engine) and should not be discharged to more than about 50%. If the batts are constantly discharged below 50% then the cycle life of the batts is very poor.

The alt can charge realistically at about 100Ah so with a bit of luck it will take about 1 1/2 hours to charge maybe every second day (with luck) depending on usage, it will be interesting to see what happens in real life.

There is always stuff to consider, eg I bought a sat antennae to use for weather and also it can be coupled into the E series Raymarine and then fed out to the radio for sat radio. Sadly the down side is that the E series has to be on for the radio to be on. So much for reducing the power consumption. I ran into the same issues with other Raymarine add ons to the E series in that you would need a back up gen set running all the time just to keeps the electrons flowing to the toys. Ah well one lives and learns.

I think that the back of the boat will soon be looking like a Christmas tree with all the antennae.