Cruising off the beaten track. Redundancy and electrical generation

Posted on January 29th, by admin in News. No Comments

You have to have a spare!

I have been dragging around an old “Walker log” for thwalker loge past 30 years. (Its so old its box has my dads address written on it) Its a trailing log. A spinner attached to a long string which you chuck over board. As you sail along the spinner turns and winds the string. This string is attached to a simple clockwork device with three dials which measure nautical miles sailed ( distance run)

Why would I carry such a piece of pre history ? The simple answer is that it doesn’t use electricity. I don’t use it often, but it came out of its box in the middle of the Irish sea last year. Electric logs are great but they fail. When they do we must still measure distance run.

Cooking gas

Is widely available in UK ( Calor) and camping gaz is available fairly widely over Europe ( at huge expense!)
Although we all carry a spare Propane or Butane canister, what happens when they both run out and we can’t get more? I have had this in Norway for example. Gas was available but not in a bottle I could fit in our gas locker. grr!

Redundancy again. We didn’t have any, but we do now in the form of a new battery charger which is also a powerful inverter. Basically a big transformer which can either take shore power at 220Volts and convert it to 12 volts DC to charge the battery bank. Or take 12 volts from the battery bank and convert it to 220AC for the kettle, toaster, and Microwave! ( Oh yes, for those with long hair it also runs the Hair drier. My better half getting involved here)inverter charger

Our old 40 amp battery charger was removed from the engine room. I couldn’t believe its weight! ( 20 year old tech) the new Inverter charger goes in to replace it. The new one does two jobs and is lighter overall.

It does involve some very heavy DC cabling and serious attention to earth bonding for when you are connected to shore power and when producing 220 AC when when not connected to a shore side earth. (Get a sparky in if you don’t understand this)

Mago’s old battery charger worked well for 20 years, but made a loud buzzing noise which always kept me awake. This new one is silent when charging. When in inverter mode it is also completely silent and you can’t say that for the other way of overcoming this problem. A diesel generator!


Electrical generation


Yes I can hear you. ” We’ve got to charge those batteries”  A big bank of Solar panels looks after 500 amp hours of Service bank most of the time, but at night or when were passage making in the fog and need to spin the radar all the time? We have this beast. A “Duogen”  It kicks out 15 amps at 7 knots of boat speed when in turbine mode. Then when we stop we flip it up and fit a fan. Now it delivers about 4 amps in ten to 12 knots of windduogen-wind-generator


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