Episode 4: Electrical Musings

 Episode 4:

 

Being separated from the boat and the workshop during lockdown has been a real frustration. But Pole has his in-house garage and has braved the cold to get stuck into some pretty fancy engineering on the two beams - I'll let him tell you all about those in Episode 5.

 

For me, the challenge has been to find jobs that can be done in the spare room. One such job has been sorting out the boat's power supply.

 

This particular task began with considerations about how we would navigate and communicate. In the past whenever I've done long ish trips in open boats, I've gone for the low-tech route and used paper charts. This didnt seem particularly practical for a tornado though and we fairly quickly decided that the electronic route would be the way to go. 

 

Nav equipment wont be the fancy purpose built stuff from people like Raymarine. Instead we'll be doing it the cheap and cheerful way using tablets, mobile phones and two of the many navigation apps that are out there. 

 

Although we plan to park up most nights and get our beauty sleep, we have realised that we can't be sure of being anywhere near a 3-pin plug when we do so; meaning that we need to become electrically independent if we are to keep our tablets and phones etc charged up.

 

Over the winter we have looked carefully at all the options: wind power, hydro power and PV solar. Of these the most reliable (and affordable) seemes to be solar. We will be going round at a time of year when there will be plenty of daylight and it seems safer to rely on this than on possibly intermittant windspeeds.

 

That then begged the questions of how big a solar panel (or panels) would be needed, how much battery capacity and where would be put it all?

 

We tied ourselves in knots trying to work out what the requirements would be, knowing that a mistake would mean either unnecessary expense and weight or flat batteries.

 

Fortunately, in an idle moment, I found myself watching

Nipegegiroundbritain

's Dinghy Show presentation on youtube and spotted the section on the electrics they fitted to their Wayfarer. Some quick action with the pause button and a screen print and we were able to shamelessly steal their wiring diagram and their experience and give ourselves some confidence that our guesstimates of what a workable system might look like would be ok. 

 

Our system is simpler than theirs as we have a bit less stuff to power than they did plus we wouldnt be running our kit 24/7 like they did. We settled on a 130W solar panel from Sunstore together with two 12Ah wheelchair batteries as the basis for our system.

 

Wayfarers have a lot more places to put stuff like this than Tornados, so working out how we would store it all was also a mission in itself, particularly as waterproof boxes seem to be ridiculously expensive ...

 

We wont be able to finalise our system until the boat goes together, but we eventually managed to source a sensibly priced waterproof polypropylene box to take the batteries and the regulator. The panel itself will be suspended somehow (not sure exactly how just yet) between the hulls aft of the rear beam.

A little bit of woodwork by my dad saw our two batteries nicely packaged into the orange box together with the charge controller. A waterproof gland and a cable mount connector got the solar panel cable out of the box and connected to the panel itself.

 

I managed to do a limited test on the system, with the panel propped up in the kitchen window on a pretty grim, grey day last week. In spite of the conditions, some charge still managed to find its way into the batteries, so I am optimistic that we have got this at least roughly right.

 

The panel itself does look a bit big to me though, and it'll need some careful positioning to keep it away from fast moving streams of water that could break it. At the moment the thinking is that it'll somehow be suspended out the back between the hiking racks , but we'll need to see to be sure that it doesnt interfere with the tiller assembly or mainsheet.

 

If you see us on the beach scratching out heads over this later this year .. we'll welcome ideas !!

 

There is room in the battery box for two or three 'power packs' of the sort that you might use to charge your phones. The charge controller has a couple of USB outlets. At the moment the thinking is that we can put the powerpacks in the box, lock them in for the day and then use the portable packs to charge the phones/tablets etc in the tent overnight. I'm a little concerned about the inefficiencies of charging what will amount to three batteries (wheel chair -> power pack -> device), so this might need revising after testing. 

 

As soon as it is safe to go back outside, we'll set the whole arrangement up in the garden and give it a proper test over a few days.

 

  

 

Pics show the battery box and also the test. The two bins and the plant wont be coming with us on the trip.