AC and more
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I struggle with the theory and the practice sometimes – the boat should have had 4 x 150ah AGM batteries but I had previously looked at Lead Crystal. Where the AGM would not like being depleted by more than 40%, the LCs were happy to go to zero and be fully recoverable for about 1500 cycles. In the end though I went with Tubular Gel batteries which appear to have the same spec. Maybe I focused too much on the batteries and I was surprised when we took delivery to discover there was a High Load circuit for the electrics that could only be powered by the generator or shore supply.
On this was
- The cooker, no problem with that as only the ovens are electric so it would only be required infrequently.
- The electric immersion, again not too much of an issue, in fact we have not used it once as generally the boiler or engine heats the water.
- Then the two A/C units and their pump
Now I had already decided that although the batteries were working really well (3 washing machine loads and a dishwasher load before the alarm tripped) I decided to expand the bank by another 4. Possibly far too many but it is done now.
With the help of Adam, we connected up two of the batteries giving us 6 x 150ah and then we switched the smaller A/C unit to the Low Load circuit so that it would run off batteries.
My thinking was that I would like to be able to keep the bedroom cool during those hot summer nights, without having to run the generator if we were not in a marina.
I tried this out yesterday and ran the A/C for 3 hours with absolutely no impact to the batteries and I’m sure it would have run happily for many more hours. In fact Nicki did a couple of washing machine loads and a dishwasher load and still the batteries are at 94%.
So far, so good and I’m very pleased with the outcome and almost tempted to see if the larger A/C unit would work on the Low Load. Maybe a step too far though. I was quoted that this unit would take 140 amps out of the batteries each hour.
Another smaller challenge was with a cctv camera for the bow. I got talked out of this during the build but subsequently have added a camera right on the bow. Again all with Adam’s help. We used a wireless set up because it was easier and I’m very pleased with how this has worked out. Very useful in the locks and when mooring. Love it. My only problem is that the picture is not brilliant. Yesterday though, I managed to feed a cable from the bow to the wheelhouse so I should be able to upgrade this and fix a monitor into the console at somepoint.
