Rich good observations, but I think one's electrical needs/wants would be higher if they are a full time live-a-board. I don't want to live at home like we do on the boat, so our needs are a lot higher there.richandlori wrote:As a full time live-a-board cruiser for two years now, let me offer up my thoughts on Solar Panels and the "dream" of actually running your boat off of them. At this point in the Solar Cost/Amp equation, solar simply doesn't compute as a solution for power. .......... Heck, but then my beer would be HOT!
Rich
SV THIRD DAY
Currently Floating in San Blas, Nayarit Mexico
Now saying that I think that for trips of a week or so or in our case of a month or more you can supply "most" of your electrical needs via solar on a Mac at a resonable cost. We have an S, so we have even less room to put things than on an X or M, but I'm in the process of mounting 180 watts worth of panels. I firmly believe that will take care of over 90% of our needs most of the time. The rest of the time we will rely on the 12 volt gas engine driven charger....
http://purplesagetradingpost.com/sumner ... de-13.html
Solar isn't as expensive now for our needs. We will have about $570 in the panels and a little over $200 for a good MPPT controller and some wire. I have about $400 in the generator I built, so a total of say $1200.
After I added the 40 watt panel we only had to run the generator on the average of about 15 minutes a day. I use a CPAP machine at night that uses about 36-42 amp hours a day. Without that the 40 watt would run the boat, but there again we are not full time live-a-boards. We have added an EdgeStar frig. and some of the guys seem to be getting by with about 65 watt panels to stay up with the frig. I'm hoping, yes hoping, that the 80 we are adding will handle the frig, and the 60 we are also now adding along with the 40 we had will take care of my CPAP machine and the computer/chartplotter, TV and GPS/fishfinder. I think on good sun days we will be fine and we have the generator to fall back on.
Since all of us have different needs/wants I think it is hard for any of us to predict what will work for someone else. If we were in your situation I'm sure we would want more than what we have now.
After we run the new setup for a while I'll be reporting on if it lived up to our expectations or not.
c ya and it sounds like you have a good life,
Sum
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. How many hours total of sunlight is there the time of the year you will be there? From that you should be able to figure out about how many 'good hours of sun' you will get. Are you going to run this combination over the summer? That for sure will tell you a lot.
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