Solar Power

When planning our new home, I wanted to be as self sufficient as possible with the budget we had. Electric power on a boat can be costly. Running generators seems expensive and noisy to me, so that was not going to be my first choice. Wind power is better, but it still invloves a noisy wind turbine and there is the issue of wind. It sometimes doesn't blow enough to keep the batteries charged. We decided on solar as our primary power source. We can charge the batteries by running the engine as a back-up to solar, but we have 600 watts of solar and 1000ah of battery capacity, so our hope is that we will not have to run the engine as a generator very often.

We made a hard bimini from Nidacore and West Systems epoxy. It is a great place for 2 of the 5 120 watt panels on our boat. The other 3 panels went on the davits. We used a 45 amp Morningstar solar charge controller to regulate output to charge the batteries.

Our boat was in need of on-deck storage, so we added 2 coolers on the aft deck just for storage, but found that they make great additional seating when sailing with guests on the boat.

Davits are a must on a cruising boat, but they don't just provide a place to hang the dingy. The top is a great place for solar panels.