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Adding more green energy

A huge problem we encountered lying at anchor was keeping the batteries charged. We have a big battery bank consisting of 12 x LifeLine GPL-31XT 125 amp AGM batteries - giving us a total of 1500 amps. To charge the batteries, we have 2 x 180 watt solar panels, 1 x 13 kva diesel generator and 2 Yanmar engines with 35 amp Balmar alternators each. At the time of constructing the yacht, we thought that we had ample charging capacity and indeed we never encounter any problems on the short sailing stints we did whilst we were still in Houtbay, Cape Town, South Africa. We would often go sailing for a couple of days, drop the anchor at some remote locations and thereafter we would return to our mooring in Houtbay. The solar panels and the odd running of the generator kept the batteries at full charge and we assumed that this would be sufficient for our world cruise.

But then we added another 2 deep freezers and never thought to revisit our charging capacity. Fully loaded when we left Cape Town on our world cruise, fridges and 3 deep freezer fully stocked with food, we soon started noticing that we had a problem with our battery charging capacity. We managed by switching off the freezers as they became empty. The problem again surfaced when we arrived in Brazil, restocked the yacht with food and then anchoring for extended periods of time. In particular, when we arrived in French Guyana, we found that we had to run the generator for hours every day. We also have a Mastervolt charging system on board which manages the charge going into the batteries. When starting the generator, the full charge would go into the batteries but Mastervolt reduces this as the minutes/hours ticks away. After running the generator for 4 hours, to protect the batteries, Mastervolt only allowed a tiny fraction of the amps generated to go into the batteries. This is uneconomical and it makes no sense to run a 13 KVA generator whilst only 1 or 2 amps are allowed to go into the batteries.

To overcome this problem, we will now be adding another 3 x 145 watt Kyocera KD145SX-UFU solar panels and 2 x Air Breeze Marine 24 VDC wind generators to our charging capacity. Our calculations show that this will give us between 180 and 300 amps of charging capacity - and the beauty is that it is green energy. A custom made stainless steel structure will be manufactured and fitted to the back of Revelations to accommodate all this equipment.

KYOCERA-KD145SX-UFU Specifications
Air Breeze Specifications

GreenEnergy

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