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Power
Home from work at last, you light up the house,
turn on the music, check your answering machine and throw some popcorn
into the micro. It’s all easy and convenient and you never give any
thought to how much power you use.
Well, welcome to "water-world". A couple of 60W light bulbs at home will
use up the same amount of power as your allowance for the entire boat in
one whole day .
There are three factors to take into account when dealing with power:
How to get it, how to store it, and how much you´ll need.
They way to deal with the power problem is to count on it and then go
out and try it. Using only your calculator will never measure up to
reality, especially on an old boat. The reasons are bad wiring, poor
charging and gear that use more power than the manual promised.
Your habits have to be changed. Forget air-con and large fridge (or any
fridge at all perhaps).
Power basics
The power mainly used on the boat is DC (Direct current) contrary to the
AC (Alternating current) used in your home. DC is low voltage and much
safer to work, especially in marine environment.
Voltage (V) is the charge (or tension) you get in a battery. A small
AA-battery has a charge of 1.5 volt. Your boat battery will most
probably carry 12 volt. If the battery is low on power the charge will
go down below 11 volt. If fully charged it will go above 12 volt. You
can check how much voltage you have in the battery using the voltage
meter on the boat (or if you don’t have one , get a digital tester in
any hardware store).
Ampere (A) is the flow of the charge. Your battery will be labeled with
how many amp-hours (Ah) that may be pulled from the battery at a certain
voltage. If for instance you have a fully loaded 12 V, 100 Ah battery ,
you may pull 1 Amp per hour at 12 V for 100 hours.
Watt (W) is the work the electricity has to do to power up a lamp, a GPS
or something else on the boat.
Power need is a combination all of the three above: watt = volts x
amps
In the above example (12 Volt, 100 Ah battery) you´ll have 1200 W.
To double the amp hours in your batteries, you can do a parallel
connection between two or more batteries. Hook up the positive end of
one battery to the positive end of another battery and then similarly
the negative with the negative. If each battery had 100 Ah at 12 V, they
will now still give a charge of 12 V but at 200 Ah.
And you’ll have 12 V x 200 amps = 2400 W.
To raise the voltage you need to do a serial connection. Connect the
positive of one battery to the negative of the other battery. Then
connect the negative of the first battery to the positive of the second.
If each battery had 100 Ah at 12 V, they will now still give 100 Ah but
at 24 V.
This is useful if for instance working with 6 V batteries, thus raising
the voltage to 12 V.
Battery
You need two sets of batteries on the boat. The first set will be used
only for starting the motor, these are your cranking batteries. The
second set will be used to power everything else on the boat , those are
your house batteries.
Out at sea you will most certainly run into a situation where you take
too much power out of the battery. If you haven’t separated your
cranking battery from the house battery, you will pretty soon be a real
sailor.
Santa Maria is powered by a 12V 60Ah cranking battery and a 12V 180 Ah
house battery bank. This is however on the low side.
When choosing batteries you’ll choose between wet cell or gel-cell
batteries. The gel-cell batteries need less maintenance and won’t have
any liquid that can spill out. This whole subject is a science of its
own however. When installing and choosing the batteries , shop around
and take advice from a good marine electrician.
Imagine your car being lifted 5 feet above the ground, and then dropped.
Now, imagine this happening every 30 seconds. Keep doing this for three
weeks. This is what is going to happen to your boat during an Atlantic
passage. Do we need to say you have to fasten you batteries securely?
Put your battery in a compartment that is easily accessible since you
will surely spend some time down here.
Charging the batteries with the engine
 The
main power source (generator) on your boat will be the
engine. This is how it will work: Start the engine (it doesn’t matter if
your gear is in neutral, forward or back). The engine will start turning
the propeller. Simultaneously, your engine will also power an
alternator.
When rotating, the alternator will create an electrical impulse. The
electric flow will then pass through some kind of voltage
regulator (restricting the voltage) and charge the battery. The
voltage entering a 12 V battery needs to be at least 14 V for the
battery to charge properly.
So, the engine is generating power to the alternator, which is
alternating the power to electricity, then pass it through a regulator
before charging the battery.
Alternators will generally produce 60 Ah. That indicates that you need
to run your engine for one hour to fully charge a 60 Ah battery or 3
hours to charge a 180 Ah battery. Another way to look at it is that if
you are using 60 Ah at 12 V, you´ll need to run the motor for one hour
to cover the power used.
Of course there are some if´s and but´s to this. First of all, your
battery will most probably not be chargeable above 80% of its capacity.
Secondly, a battery is often not capable of receiving more than 25% of
its rating per hour. This indicates that a 100 Ah battery only can be
charged by 25 Ah an hour, even if the alternator is producing more.
How fast should you run the motor for efficient charging? At low speed
it might not charge enough and at high you might be wasting your fuel.
Discuss this with your marine electrician and learn the specifics of
your boat. Don’t forget to write it all down , you´ll need it when
calculating the fuel for the passage.
A simple way to check if your engine really is charging the battery, is
to switch of all electrical appliances and put your digital tester to
the battery. If the voltage is moving upwards when you run the motor -
then it’s charging. There is a safety switch that stops the charging
when the battery is fully charged (at around 14 V).
Never let your battery drain below 10,5 V , that would probably destroy
it.
Other power sources
 Next
to engine power, wind power is the best way to charge your batteries.
Wind generators use either a propeller or a turbine to catch the wind.
When crossing the Atlantic you will have the trade wind moving the same
way as the boat. This means that the wind hitting the wind generator
will be less than the true wind. If your boat is moving at a speed of 7
knots and the wind is 15 knots, the perceived wind will be only 8 knots.
Santa Maria has an Aerogen 6 that is supposed to generate 300 Ah a day
(24-hours) at 10 m/s (20 knots). Since we moved at 7 knots, the 20 knots
wind only affected the generator with 13 knots or less.
We felt that the benefit of the wind generator was so low, that we
actually stopped it after some time.
Sailors are however often very positive about their wind generators,
especially the new, turbine units.
We met a couple sailing a catamaran at Los Testigos, of Venezuela. They
dragged a water turbine behind their boat and were very enthusiastic
about it. We don´t know much about this power source however.
Solar panels are surely the dream of the future. They are yet not as
effective as wind generators but quiet. To get 1 Ah at 12 V you need a
panel app. 1 feet by 2 feet (33 x 66 cm). Better quality panel gives you
a higher output from a smaller panel area. Most panels need however to
be mounted on a surface that is not shadowed by the sails to give full
power. That can prove hard to accomplish on an Atlantic crossing.
Let’s take an
overview.
If you use 200 Ah a day and want to replace that you need to:
- Run the engine
for 4 hours a day, or
- Use one wind
generator during perfect conditions, or
- Use solar panels
covering an area of 10 by 3 feet
(3 by 1 meter)
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We recommend that you use all three of these power sources. They all
have their pros and cons, and tend to complement each other.
Using power
In the manuals of your electrical appliances it will be specified what
effect the appliances need (watts) or how many ampere-hours (Ah) they
will use.
Find the information for everything that needs power and put it down in
a power scheme, like the one below. Check that all datas applies to 12
V.
| Equipment |
Watts |
Amp |
Hours of use
|
Power usage |
10 lights
Auto pilot
Radar
Sonar |
15
12
60
10 |
1.25
1
5
0.8 |
3
24
2
24 |
37.5 Ah
24 Ah
10 Ah
19 Ah |
| Total power usage |
90.5 Ah |
To do the calculations, use the formula; watts = volt x amps.
When planning for the passage, our first calculation indicated a total
power usage of more than 400 Amps. Just to run the radar all day would
count for 120 Ah. We had to cut down the calculations over and over
again. We ended up below 100 Ah a day, thus needing to run the engine
for around two hours daily.
Wiring
 If
you get an old boat like Santa Maria, there will probably be as many
sets of wires as the number of previous owners. Try to locate and
replace all of them before you set off. We didn’t and had a hard time
locating the wires when something malfunctioned.
Loose wires might leak current. If the insulation is torn around the
conductor there may be additional leakage, and you will end up with much
higher energy consumption than expected.
Choose different colors for the wires and note down in a wire scheme how
it all connects. Ask for your local official color standard and
recommendations at the marine store. Use at least the wire thickness
recommended for the appliances you install.
Electrical panel
 The
current used for appliances should be picked up at a distribution panel
and not directly from the battery. We have seen panels that are mounted
on hinges, easily accessing to all the wires , ours is screw-mounted and
a real bore.
Mark all the switches in English even if that is not your native
language. If you need an electrician, he will most certainly understand
the English technical terminology.
Mount a couple of DC cigarette outlets on the electrical board. You will
need them for charging VHF, computer and more.
DC/AC inverters
There is a way to invert your DC current to AC so you can bring fans,
TV-sets or other non-DC prepared equipment on board. There are simple
mobile units for low requirements at your local Radioshack or more
advanced units for fixed mounting at marine stores.
Dock power
When cruising from harbor to harbor it’s great to have the possibility
to plug in to the docks supplied AC power. We use it for charging the
batteries and have a couple of AC outlet in the boat for use when in
harbor. It’s OK to have only one light on when cruising, yet when at a
dock it’s nice to light up the boat without the worry to flatten the
batteries.
Fuel
Your engine will be using diesel. Before you leave home you need to do a
few tests: How much diesel will the engine use at full speed, half speed
and at low speed.
Combine the results with the information you got from
the electrician, as of what speed you need to run the engine for most
efficient battery charging.
Santa Maria have a 20 year old Universal Atomic Diesel. It generates 44
H.P. At low speed (charging the batteries well) we used just over 2
liter an hour. Our charging need was two hours a day. We left the Canary
Islands with 200 liter of diesel but used only 100 liters on our 20-day
passage.
The tank took 100 liter. We stored the rest on deck, in tightly fastened
containers.
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