As we go round the world we want to be self sufficient for power and that means understanding what power is coming in and going out of the batteries. The main type of battery monitor available is an amp hour counter which counts the amps going in and the amps going out.  We went with the e-xpert lite based on Olly’s recommendation.  Over time, these type of monitors become less accurate though and need to be reset but they do provide useful data about what is happening right now such as amps in or out. However, anyone with an understanding of our approach to the refit will not be surprised that we would not be happy with a single way of measuring these things which could become inaccurate. There is another type of battery monitor which has a very complex algorithm within it and measures the battery itself to calculate a percentage of charge in the battery bank. This system actually gets more accurate over time as the algorithm helps it to tune it’s settings to “learn” about the batteries it is monitoring. The combination of these two monitors gives us a powerful way of understanding our power use and state of charge. This will allow us to manage our power use much more effectively.  We can monitor and adjust our power use and it will also help us to understand the effectiveness of our charging mechanisms: engine, shore power, generator and solar power. We will report on how well this works in practice in future posts.

Of course the decision making process was difficult and involved a lot of research and expert impartial advice from Oliver at Seapower who also installed all the equipment for us.

As part of the original fit of the Moody, it had come with an inverter, long since removed by a previous owner, and an HFL generator, which had been scrapped soon after our purchase because it didn’t work and was uneconomical to repair. The entire cooling system had corroded on the original 10.5 KVa generator and although it had a little over 700 hours, it had clearly always been problematic. It was also very noisy with ill fitting sound proof panels and we knew that we would have the same level of problems as the previous owners.

So the generator was removed and we considered our options.  The generator had been sized to allow for all three air conditioning units to be on at the same time without causing an issue. We don’t expect to be running these very often at all and certainly not all three! We suspect what had happened to the generator apart from inadequate maintenance was that it had always been run at a low load hence causing problems with the engine that forms the core of the generator.  Now despite the fact that we still have all three aircon units, a large microwave, watermaker and several other potentially high energy use items, we didn’t think this justified over-specifying the generator. But of course, we would need to cope with higher loads at times…..

A quality inverter charger was a good solution since it would seamlessly top up the power output from the batteries.  This works fine when the high load is for a short period but needs to be watched if this lasts a long time.  No-one wants to drain the entire battery bank in an hour!  This allows the generator to be specified as a little lower power output which means it will more often be used at a reasonable load for the generator. I also means that you need to have good battery monitoring in place and more on that on another post.

Looking at a ten year timescale, we knew we needed to buy a quality product and two in particular stuck out for us: the studer, which had been bought by some good friends of ours ( Clare and Vic on Njord) and the Victron. The victron had some good features but the Studer seemed to have a better reputation for quality.  The clincher for us was the global support network.  They are both good but there are several times more dealers and repair centres for Victron, so in the unlikely eventuality that we had a problem, it would be easier to repair.

Then we started looking at the generator.  We did a lot of research on line and came down to a short list of Northern Lights, Kohler and Onan. There was little to choose between these but the supplier of our electrical systems were also Onan dealers and this helped to sway our minds.  The fact that the generator was a difficult install which required it to be taken apart and taken in pieces to the engine room before being rebuilt was an added complication. By choosing Lindsay at Seapower who works closely with Ollie, meant that this could be done without invalidating the warranty on the generator.

The install is incredibly neat with a remote digital panel on the flight deck that Maria considers our new electrical panel to resemble.  Having spent some time with Lindsay, I have to say we are happy both with our choice of generator and supplier.  Lindsay has taken care making sure that our install will be trouble free for as long as we have the boat. One additional feature we added was to have the hot water from the cooling system feed the hot water boiler.  The generator creates a lot of heat and it seems a shame to throw that away into the sea when it could be used o provide a useful source of hot water for us.  It also means that we have redundancy in the hot water if the heating element breaks.

Sorry the pictures are all a bit boring, the key here is that everything is done under the surface so that the boat is powered well at anchor, at sea or in a marina with limited power.

Actually, an advantage we have found straight away in the Marina is that we no longer need to worry about switching off the electric fire when we want to boil the kettle.  Previously this always tripped the switches but now the boat can support this for a short time from the batteries and then recharges the batteries later.  We think this will be quite useful when we are away for small intense loads like the kettle or microwave although we need to be careful about the rate that we deplete the batteries as well as the amount of power we take out.

The original electrical panel was still in place on the Moody and this had various additions added to it over the years. On the left hand side there were two chart plotters. The Raymarine was original fit and was linked to the similar unit in the cockpit.  Around about 2010, AIS had been added and rather than upgrade the navigation a decision was taken to add an additional plotter to show the AIS information. Personally the thought of going below to check the AIS track of a large ship that may be on a collision course sounded like madness.  Also with our plans to go round the world we didn’t expect the original navigation to last 25 years without trouble.  So the decision was taken to upgrade the Raymarine navigation and remove the redundant setup. We considered other manufacturers but we have been comfortable with Raymarine equipment and so decided to stay loyal to the manufacturer, also thinking that it should be quite easy for us to understand how it worked since it would be an evolution from the equipment we were used to. Of course an upgrade from that period meant that the existing radar set up would have to be replaced.

Thats when the fun started, so firstly there was a deal where we could get the fish finder add on for the cost of the sensor – anyone who knows Maria’s fishing ability will know that this is money well spent….we will never see any fish on it!

We were also thinking about our plans to travel and the knowledge that the likelihood the charts will not be accurate.  For that reason we thought it would be worth looking at Forward Facing Sonar (FFS) so that we can see exactly what is in front of us and hopefully therefore avoid hitting it! Now on the East Coast, where we have very shallow water and mud, there is an unwritten rule that if you haven’t touched the mud you probably aren’t really trying ;). We are very careful these days having touched the bottom once in the Dufour but I am guessing that running into a reef will be no laughing matter so FFS it is.  It looked like the Echopilot was the best fit for us and integrated with everything else. We have combined that with a 7inch plotter which will show this view to Maria at the helm. I am led to believe that the purchase of this equipment was no reflection of a lack of trust in my ability to tell Maria if we are going too shallow but a niggling doubt remains… 🙂

Anyway, we also took the opportunity of another trade in deal with Raymarine to modernise our autopilot. We are hoping that the new equipment will help us to have fewer breakdowns and repairs in the future or at the very least have spare parts available. I wouldn’t fancy finding a spare part for a 20 year old plotter on a small desert island. So we have three plotters: nav station down below, next to the companionway and a smaller display on the steering binnacle for Maria to see her FFS as well as all the other functionality.

Finally, we changed all of the small instruments above the companionway to complete the modernisation.

None of this would have been possible without the excellent advice and work of Oliver from Seapower Marine. He has been wonderful and I think has kept the cost down as much as possible while making Mariadz as fault free as is humanly possible.  He has even identified and rectified water damage from the fresh water used to put out the fire in the galley all those years ago.

One good thing was that the boat came with relatively new Rolls AGM batteries. These seemed in reasonable condition and they were split as a dedicated engine start battery and two bags of 4x110Ah batteries dedicated to domestic supply and the winches. Having done some research on battery charging, we decided that we would never want to reduce the batteries below 50% which means that we effectively have 200Ah of usable energy if the batteries are fully charged.

The moody has over 30 lights which are 10W. If these are left on for an hour that is 300W which at 12V is 25Ah. You can probably see where this is going….. If I switch the lights on I use up all my battery power!

One of the first jobs on the Dufour had been to change all of the bulbs to G4 LED Warm White Light Bulbs which draw a tenth of the power. It was clear that this was something that was needed on the Moody immediately. We opted for warm white bulbs to give a softer light and these have been excellent. At the same time, we changed all of the navigation lights to LED too so at least our lighting is optimal.

The winches draw a lot of power when they are used but a dedicated battery bank did seem excessive especially as we have winch handles! So it seemed sensible to consolidate the battery banks and use these across all uses. A second idiosyncrasy with the Moody is that the service battery bank is above the keel, not a bad place to have quite a bit of weight. The second bank is under the aft master cabin bed! So it wasn’t just that I had put some weight on that had led to the stern being lower in the water. There is a slot available aft of the existing battery bank and before the engine room where the second bank could be located. This seemed sensible from an electrical perspective and with a view to weight distribution. Moving a couple of pumps, which also simplified pipe work, was all that was required to make this change happen.

So now we have 800Ah of batteries for our winches and domestic use.