More Solar Progress

People keep saying you can't fit enough solar on a monohull, that a big catamaran is needed. However, we are now moving towards a massive 2,415watts of solar on Vida.

That will be made up of

• 4 x 215watt (sticking out of the back, but we are making it sowe can bring it all onto the boat for safety if we are at sea in bad weather). We have just come up with a new design for how this will work and we will be building a test rig soon.
• 4 x 175watt (along the guardrails, can be tilted out of the way or quite easily brought into the boat)
• 4 x 40watt (on the wheelhouse roof)
• 2 x 100watt (going on a wheelhouse extension)
• 4 x 110watt (portable, we will be able to position them facing the sun when at anchor)
• 1 x 55watt (portable, we will be able to position it facing the sun when at anchor)

Here you can see 2 x 215watt and 2 x 100watt being used as a temporary timber store roof.

Before we can connect the solar panels we need to connect the main battery bank. That is a 48 volt system made from 4 x 300AH Lithium batteries (LiFePo4 which is much safer that what electric cars use). I have now finished a full draft of the wiring schematic that covers this battery bank, all the solar and the connection to shore power. It has 5 pink boxes for the other schematics that we need:

• 240 volt AC system (consumer unit that powers the induction hob, combination microwave etc)
• 48 volt DC Electric Motor (this has it's own 480AH battery bank which is charged from the main 48volt bank)
• 12 volt DC House (used for lights, navigation, computers). This means that even if all the Lithioum batteries fail we will still have working lights, charts etc.
• 12 volt DC windlass (used to pull the anchor up)

The only connection between the DC systems are DC to DC chargers. So all charging comes into the main 48 volt battery bank (Shore Power or a petrol generator, and solar) and this charges the other DC systems batteries.

Here is the schematic:

I've just got to add details about all the cables we need to make:

• wire size (our largest is 95mm2 which is very thick)
• crimp connector hole size (for the same wire size we need to crimp on different connectors according to the size of the bolt or stud that it will connect to. They vary from 6mm to 12mm.
• length

We have most of the parts but need to buy a few bits.

Producing this has been very time consuming. Meanwhile, Jane has been coating the support arms for guardrail solar panels with epoxy. I think we are up to 2 coats everywhere and 3 on some of them.

Thoughts and suggestions welcome 😄