I'm not a big fan of wind power for boats. It may make sense for trickle charging your house batteries, but as a power source for propulsion it just doesn't make sense to me. In order to do any good you'd a serious amount of blade area, mounted up high, vulnerable to storms and all sorts of mechanical trouble. If you're going to have all that rigging why not just put up some sails?
Then again, a 40x14 houseboat has a lot of roof space.
At about 18 peak watts per square foot for the best solar panels these days, you could put 10KW of peak generating capacity on that roof. That's about 13.5 HP. After working out all the details - power conversion and motor losses, sun angle, hours of daylight, etc, you might be able to do 8 or 10HP for a few hours a day. With a real efficient hull, that could translate to say 20 or 25 miles per day. You could potentially complete the Great Loop in a year's time at that rate. A lot of folks with their 1/2 mile per gallon "trawlers" take that much time and they spend enough on diesel to buy your solar panels.
The real key is hull efficiency. Think long-low-skinny European style canal house-boat, not American style big-fat-RV-on-a-barge house-boat.
Anyhow, just throwing some wild guesstimates out there for the sake of discussion, and trying to put some perspective on what is theoretically feasible.
Cheers,
Jim McMillan
--- In electricboats@yahoogroups.com, "Myles Twete" <matwete@...> wrote:
>
> Regarding motor requirements for your needs, I defer to the experts who know the Great Loop.
>
> As for recharging with wind or solar, it comes down to doing an energy analysis and knowing what your operational environment will be.
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