Chargers

We had a very quiet day Saturday sitting in this anchorage. A few boat chores were done but nothing exciting. I’ll therefore take this opportunity to share how many ways we have of charging our house bank.

We now have 16 Trojan T-105 6V batteries for our house bank. Each battery is rated at 225 Amp Hours. They’re paired making the equivalent of 8 12V 225 Ah batteries giving us a total of 1,800 Ah capacity. Being lead acid, though, we get to use about a third of this.

The original design of the hybrid system had two 72V banks of batteries to power the motors. From these came a pair of 72V/12V voltage reducers to power the house. Because of varying demand on the house circuit a small house bank was put in place to cache the power.

Early on we found we didn’t like this set up for a number of reasons and by the end of our first season we had put in a 140A house charger and upped our house bank size considerably.

The recent conversion we had to diesel assumed we had a standard configuration boat so it came with a new means to charge the house bank to replace the 72V/12V voltage reducers/cross chargers. This came in the form of 2 40A chargers running off the generator. These are able to work in parallel with our 140A charger so when we have the generator running we can put 220A into our house bank.

When we moved aboard the boat our insurance company demanded we had a backup to the generator start battery. This was because the generator played a key role in the motoring of the vessel. We had installed a means to cross connect the house bank with the generator start battery. This also means we could, if we had to, charge the house bank using the generator alternator.

There’s more of course. Each new engine has an 80A alternator so when we’re motoring, usually with just one engine, we get to push a few more amps into our batteries.

And, of course, we have our solar panels and our wind generator to help too.

Since we launched, and because we’re not running the freezer, power management aboard the boat has been a no brainer. We’ve only ever run the generator to do a wash and on a couple of cold evenings to warm the boat. The rest of the time we’ve done nothing. It will be interesting to see how things change when the freezer is on.

We will be moving today but where is yet to be determined. A system has come over and we now have south westerly winds. The boats have all shifted around in the anchorage and our different chain lengths have created new neighbours. From the realtime radio broadcasts from stations around the area the wind speeds are averaging mid-20s and peaking in the 30s. If this remains the case we’ll wait until tomorrow to go to Great Barrier. By then the swell will also be in our direction making for a smoother passage. The only downside of delaying a day is one less day to enjoy our destination and one more day stuck here.

In two hours we’ll be moving somewhere regardless as the wind shift has left us with a bit of fetch (distance over which the wind can blow over water) resulting in a bumpy anchorage. The smaller boats around us are rocking a lot and some have already moved off.