Building a solar farm on our boat

Another windy but productive day.

Coming in a future video was the task of creating nine support arms for the extra three solar panels that will hang from the guard rails. It was too windy to use the workmate on deck, so I spent most of the day on the ground working on these. I started with the rough shapes that I had cut using the jigsaw. I used the belt sander to get them more even in thickness. Then a hole saw to cut the hole that the carbon fibre guard rail goes through. Six of them needed a 26 mm hole, but I only had a 25mm hole saw, so I had to hand finish them with a rasp. The other three were fine with a 32mm hole saw. Then I used the trim router to round off all the edges before sanding them.

Meanwhile, Jane had caught up with all our washing. Second time around the little washing machine and spin dryer (see Our Boat Laundry) worked brilliantly and the strong wind with a bit of sun got everything dry very quickly.

The next step was for Jane to put an epoxy resin coating on all nine solar panel supports to protect the wood. We have them curing overnight in the clubhouse. At least one more coat will be needed before we paint them.

My next task was to build a wood store on the deck with two of our big 215 watt solar panels on top. See the photos:

Tomorrow I need to sort out some racking for the timber and attach the tarp under the solar panels. This should be a huge time saver as otherwise we end up filling the cabin with the timber or have to keep going to the storage container. Also I can get the solar hooked up and it will start saving us money on our electricity.

This is very temporary as our main mast will come right through the middle of them. Our original (complicated and changing a lot) plans were to mount four of these big panels sticking out from the back of the boat but we are not sure what we can manage at the monent.

In terms of the boat refit, we feel we are making faster progress now. In the past, we had two days twice a month (plus holidays), and a lot of time was spent travelling, unpacking, packing and moving stuff. Getting started with jobs and clearing up afterwards is much faster now and we can do it day after day rather than have to thing in 2 day projects.

Newsletter/Membership Reminder

Tomorrow is Sunday. So there will not be an Update Newsletter. Instead we will have the weekly(ish) newsletter. There will be two versions. Paid-up members will get the full weekly newsletter, and it will include a list of all the posts that week (so you won't miss out if you choose only one email per week). Everyone on the Free Tier who is subscribed to the weekly(ish) newsletter will get the list of posts and an excerpt of the full newsletter.

The full newsletter will also include a pre-release of this week's video - it is a real page turner if you are interested in dyneema splicing ;-)