For many years now, but before Pat passed away, we had a wind generator mounted on the roof and which could be deployed quickly. Initially this was used mainly to keep the batteries charged when moored at Harefield because we had no possibility of a mains hook up there. When we moved marinas, we did have electricity so we kept the generator for use when casually moored. Although the Rutland is a really good piece of kit it’s no good without wind and it is just a fact that canals are, for the most part, very sheltered so I was disappointed with its contribution to our energy budget. I did have some glue on solar panels throughout much of the narrowboat’s life but they were not particularly efficient, early days in the solar experience I suspect, and these had other problems with deep rust pockets developing in the roof around the edges of the panels. When we had the boat repainted, they had to go. Now that I am single handing, I spend a lot of time on the roof of the boat when working locks and need to keep obstructions and trip hazards to a minimum, so do not want large modern mounted panels on the roof, even though they would otherwise be an excellent solution to avoid the need to run the engine when moored up for any length of time. Previously we were always going places “at speed”, aka long days motoring, and the batteries were never really a worry. I don’t want to use the boat like that now I am alone so having to run the engine for 4 hours when moored, just to charge batteries, seems wrong. Petrol generators present a risk from the handling of a highly flammable fuel and converting them to gas is an option but its the bother of getting gas and its storage.
Self contained lithium battery power storage packages have appeared on the market recently (“Ecoflow Delta” caught my eye) and so I bought one for use at home. It is really quite a useful bit of kit for camping or taking a kilowatt of power for some purpose away from a mains supply. It then occurred to me that it would be really useful on the boat. But how to keep it charged? Would the existing alternator/domestic battery/inverter charger be able to cope. It takes an hour to charge from fully discharged I.e. 1 kilowatt for one hour. The alternator only manages around 60 amps which is 720 watts at 12 volts, so what happens is that the rest has to come from the domestic batteries. Not ideal, however it does work as a backup supply when the batteries are running low. So to make this work, what I do is to put a significant charge on the domestics before topping up the lithium. This doesn’t shorten total recharging time in this case but to use an extra kilowatt over the normal domestic battery use would be very unusual if cruising every day.
This Ecoflow company sells folding solar panels. A nominal 220 watts and they are double sided, supplied for camping. So I got one. It turns out to be a very practical solution. Doesn’t give 220 watts of course, more like 150 watts under good average sunny conditions and very quick easy to set up. They work best, of course with a MPPT controller so this post is really about fitting that into a practical easy to use solution.
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