Let There Be Light!

The last week in St. Martin was a flurry of activity on the boat finishing up the solar project. First we had John and his beautiful wife, Maneula, come and install the stainless steel frame that would hold the solar panels.  John is the son of a tall ship’s captain and grew up around sailboats, including sailing on the German tall ship Passat. He was trained as a shipwright and is one of those guys who can fix anything on a boat. His German wife, Maneula (named after a German folk song) helps him with projects and also repairs dodgers, biminis and other canvas projects.

Watching them approach Flying Cloud with the huge stainless frame stretched across their 12 ft. work boat, I had to hold my breath hoping they would make it before a big wave tipped them over.  Wrestling the big frame up and over the top of the davits was like watching two big guys doing ballet moves.

Just getting the two boxes of two solar panels a piece on the boat was a challenge.

After all the effort buying the panels and getting the frame built, we had a very difficult time finding clamps to hold the solar panels to the frame. Island Waterworld had some beautiful Norwegian clamps (at $26 @), but naturally had only one and we needed 24. John rooted around for about a day and came up with an ingenious solution involving stainless/rubber cable clamps that actually look better than the official clamps.

Manuela helps John with mounting the panels to the stainless steel frame.

 It took about a day to get the frame installed and the four Kyocera 140-watt panels attached. Given the design of our transom, John had to suspend himself in our bosun’s chair from the davits to attach the outboard ends of the panels. Trying to screw in tiny allen screws while the boat rocked and rolled from boat wakes was quite an adventure for John. Manuela was the perfect assistant, handing him the correct tool or bolt after a short exhortation in German. I learned lots of tool names that day, but my German still is terrible.

It took us a while to get used to the new “heliport” (as one wag described it) with the 4 ft by 8 ft expanse of panels on the back of the boat, but once the amp meter peaked out at 26 incoming amps, we knew we’d done the right thing.  We were a little uncertain as to whether we had calculated correctly for both the size of the solar panels and the size of the battery bank. We probably erred a little on the conservative side, but that’s OK on a boat.

With between 4 amps in the morning and 26 amps at peak sun, we now charge our battery bank full by about 2:00 pm on a semi-overcast day (naturally it has been overcast almost every day since we installed the panels).  With our 550-amp-hour battery bank (rated at 24v) we now rarely see the bank drop below 89%, which is amazing given that we’re running a huge 24v motor for our refrigeration system. The MPPT solar controller actually “boosts” the incoming amperage of the solar panels by about 20%, so that helps on overcast days.

We still had lots of drama left as David came over to wire the new panels to our battery bank. He had a propensity to not allow enough “fudge factor” when calculating the wire runs, necessitating many trips for me back to Budget Marine, Island Waterworld, and Electec to buy more wire, connectors, and other parts.  We had a heck of a time trying to run the heavy 8-2 gauge wire through an already full conduit back to the circuit panels. We had also decided to buy a new Blue Sky Solar Controller and network it to our existing (but smaller) Blue Sky Controller, but some esoteric settings in the black boxes gave us fits. And simply trying to mount the solar controller box and fuse box in the only available space meant that David had to twist, turn and contort his body to get both hands through the small opening, then couldn’t even see where the screws were so he could tighten them. David said many bad words that day. What I had calculated would take us a day to do took two and one-half days, but we finally got it working. Wonderful to see those big numbers coming in on the amp meter display.

All it needs is a small helicopter.

The six panels (12v panels wired in series in groups of two) gives 830 watts of pure sun energy for Flying Cloud.

 After almost a year of limping along with virtually dead batteries, hoping the engine would start or the refrigeration would keep running, we’re now in solar heaven. Now matter what happens we still have an abundance of power and no longer have to be careful about shutting off a fan when we go from one cabin to another. Even more important, we don’t have to run the engine an hour in the morning and an hour at night to charge the batteries. If you are a sailor you hate the sound of the engine anyway. We found that the engine (and the old generator) created so much heat in the engine compartment that it actually warmed up the refrigerator box that shares part of the same space. So the more we ran the engine, the hotter the icebox would get and the more we had to run the refrigerator unit to cool it. A vicious cycle.

With our new solar panels it’s like starting life over again. Wish we would have done this on day one.