Took my Ericson 27 out yesterday to test my Mars ME0709 motor from Scott
McMillan of Electric Yacht. Was very pleased with the performance of the
motor and controller. Ended up making two half hour tests. The first
test consisted of going into current (San Diego Bay) and at 26 amps it
was showing 6.5 hrs on the monitor and 3.8 and 4.4 mph on two Garmin GPS
units. At 30 amps it registered 5.3 hrs and 4.1 and 4.7 for speed.
It was early morning so wind conditions were not a factor. The wind
usually is calm in the mornings and picks up in the afternoon for good
sailing conditions. A three blade 12 x 12 prop had replaced the original
10 x 10 two blade. We noticed the increased dripping of the water from
the stuffing box and went back into the slip for repairs.
Took two hours to replace the teflon flax in stuffing nut and off we went
again. In order to replace the packing in the stuffing nut we had to
disconnect the coupler from the motor. When putting things back together
we adjusted the alignment of the motor shaft with the prop shaft. It
should be noted here that the two motor brackets positioned on each side
of the motor sit on top of a hard rubber mount to absorb vibration.
Not sure what to say about the two different GPS reading from Garmin
units, one being a Garmin 172 chartplotting monitor and the other being a
hand held Garmin Rino 530HCx. The hand held was always giving us higher
readings. But regardless, the highs and lows were acceptable.
We did encounter a slippage in the prop shaft from a forward position in
the coupler to a lower, gravity fed spot in the water. Thought perhaps a
set screw in the coupler would eleviate this condition.
On the second run we hit 6 and 6.9 speeds at 91 amps and then backed off.
At the higher speed we were getting high vibrations from the motor. The
power selector on the controller was not even in the highest position !
A comfortable setting was at 45 amps, 3.2 hours, with a speed of 4.5 and
5.0, with no current or wind concerns.
The motor never got hot, as others have reported. It was warm to the
touch. An extra collar positioned between the coupler and the stuffing
box did get warm and we suspected it was caused by not being secured to
the shaft, or was rubbing against either the stainless steel coupler or
the stuffing box. We looked for evidence of marks but did not detect
any.
By the end of six hours of tinkering and running tests the battery charge
indicated 45 percent charge, on the four wet cell batteries, Interstate
MR27 megatron 600 cca., marine deep cycle.
Once again, very pleased with the motor's performance. Some more
tinkering on the alignment and the motor mounts might eliminate the
vibrations. So nice not to have the gas/diesel odors, or the concerns of
an engine failure.
Don Swanson
11 Oct 2009 05:34:03 +1100 Matthew Geier <matthew@acfr.
writes:
MSN Stephen wrote:
> Myles,
>
> I've got twin EU2000i generators that I've put together to run the air
> conditioner on my sailboat at anchor. Works fine. I will say that I got
> sucked in and bought the parallel kit for like $250. Once I got the
> "parallel kit" and looked at it I discovered that it was a very simple
setup
> that can easily manufactured at home for much, much, MUCH less than
$250. I
> felt quite taken.
>
In a way what you paid for was an 'activation' of a latent feature of
the gen set, not an actual box of tricks. This sort of thing is common
in the IT sector - try explaining to the accountant that the thing you
just paid $10k for was a 12 digit number the vendor sent by email.
(Typing the 12 digit number into the software activates a feature that
was there all a long, but disabled).
The inverter electronics in the gen-set had to be designed from the
start to allow synchronisation of parallel connected gen-sets to happen.
Doing the synchronisation and load sharing external to the system would
be a larger and more expensive box of tricks.
Sooner or later this style of 'built in feature but disabled unless
you pay more $$$' is going to appear in the motor controllers we use - I
can see some one 'trying on' making regeneration an 'optional feature',
that when you pay the extra $$$ , you get a code to type into the
controler set-up software running on a PC that then instructs the little
computer in the controler to activate the 'optional' feature, that was
in fact embeded in there all a long, but turned off.
Another IT industry trick is to charge you for 'feature enhancements'
that are really fixes for flaws in the original system, but instead of
calling them fixes, they call them enhancements and make you pay.
____________
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