It has taken three months, but this week we got our new solar panels, inverter and house batteries hooked up. We are now (almost. 😜) educated enough so that we can discuss at some length, the virtues of many different battery solutions and are aware of the inherent compromises and advantages of different options.
We feel we have settled on what is going to be a good cruising setup for us . If we got our sums right , we will not have to run our generator at all, unless we have a week of cloudy days. We have moved all equipment inboard – it used to be in the port engine bay. We have ‘created’ a new compartment in the rear (aft) port cabin (where the optional factory genset would have gone) so we can keep all things electrical cooler, drier and less salty. The engine bay is now storage for spare parts!
Some fun facts for people- we have 4 solar panels providing 1440 potential watts. (We were pulling in over 65 amps at 10 this morning.) Our house batteries are now 750AH (up from the 400AH we had previously) and our inverter/charger has been upgraded from 2Kva to 3Kva.
As of today we have Bluetooth monitoring of our batteries and both solar controllers, as well as a dedicated remote for our inverter/ charger.