Frederick: It’s not enough. More! More, do you hear me? Throw the third switch!
IGOR: (throwing the switch) Wait till he sees the bill.
It looks like the solar panels have been green-lighted. Of course, both of you that visited here last Monday probably have no clue what I am talking about since I’m fairly sure I’ve never mentioned them except in passing, so I will elaborate.
In brief we’ve decided to put some solar panels on the top of the dodger and on the deck between the dodger and the mast. Using the BP MSX lite panels, I think we can fit a total of about 220-240 watts of panels on those areas without making the boat ugly as sin or hard to move around on. Those are semi-rigid panels, so you can drop things on them or step on them and you don’t have to have a lot of room under them – though they do not produce as much power as the big unattractive rigid units. And you probably won’t even be able to see them unless you are up on the deck or overhead – put an end to unsightly charging lines!
In theory that should be 8-10 Amps (at 24V) hourly when it is bright and sunny…probably less, but we are putting a Blue Sky charge controller in as well. Apparently this does some clever tricks with diodes to reclaim the extra voltage and pump it back into your system for about 10% more power generation. It seems your typical panel makes around 16.8V, and only 14.4V is needed to charge typical batteries. With the clever application of circuitry that extra 1.6 Volts of juice can be sliced out and automagically be bumped up and recombined back into the charging load.
So the theory is with 8-10 Amps/hr we can get somewhere between forty and eighty Amp-hours back so long as it is sunny…maybe more if we are very, very lucky. While that doesn’t keep the generator off completely it will stretch us another day, maybe two in “quiet mode”, at least until we use up the hot water. but I can run the engine for 15-20 minutes to refresh that instead of running the genset for 3-4 hours.
