Gearing Up

I’m making some headway through some of the gear purchasing. Two further items have been bought.

First was the Hookah. I did, in the end, go with the Brownie. I have bought the Explorer 390 model with the add on for a fourth diver. That will allow two couples do go out at a reasonable depth. I also got the care kit to keep it maintained well. I need to consider secondary air supplies if we decide to use this deeper than 30 feet but I won’t go with the Brownie. We already have regulators for our dive gear which could easily be adapted to go onto pony bottles. This will be one of those projects to be deferred till once we’re aboard.

Second was the solar panels and charge controller. After much research I have opted for four Kyocera 135W panels which I will wire in series into an Outback Flexmax 80 MPPT charge controller. The Kyocera arrays have built in bypass diodes so issues with shading will not be an issue. The MPPT controller allows us to obtain the best use of the combined output of the arrays when they’re wired in series. The Flexmax 80 is a little oversized but it allows us to added another panel or two if we wish at a later date.

We have decided to defer on buying a wind generator. This was our original plan and having flip flopped a bit I’ve settled on this original plan. The solar panels we’re ordering pack a lot of juice. If we have a shortfall we can learn how best to plug it. For the cost of a wind generator one can get an extra solar panel or two which may end up better. Won’t know until we’re out there.

I’ve made some more progress on recovering the lost files from the damaged laptop.  Of most concern were all our old photos.  Fortunately I had a backup from last October and practically all the photos taken since had been uploaded to Picasa so I now have most of what was lost.  A new hard drive has been ordered and hopefully the old laptop can be resurrected.  It does appear that the only water damage was up into the one hard drive but I won’t know for sure until I have a go at putting the o/s onto the new drive.

For the boat there are a few more purchases on ‘before we go’ our list.  Two that we’ll look at next are folding bikes and a solar oven.