Re: [electricboats] 39' sloop conversion

Hello Matt and everyone else here. I have been a lurker for some time myself, mostly due to time constraints. My name is Ryan. 

I have been playing an old 24' aluminum cabin cruiser, a 1966 Lonestar cruisliner III for several years now. Aside from completely re working the hull and rebuilding/rewireing everything, I i also installed 2 qty ecology brand 100w 12v panels when I was about to put her in the water the first time 2 years ago. Originally, this was just to maintain the 12v house systems at anchor for lighting, ventilation, radio, ECT. 

I happened to bring a 42lb thrust 12v Minn kota on one of the first water trials and was happy to see that it would push my not-so-small boat around 3 

Miles an hour in mild wind conditions constantly in the presence of full sun. This is what inclined me to further my experimentation. 

I last year added another 2x 100w 12v modules, and designed and built a system to use them to charge a 48v bank of Grp 31 deep cycles in series to attain the voltage necessary to push an old Johnson 9.9 that I converted to electric using a kunray 2kw e-bike chaindrive motor kit. 

This means that I also had to put the solar array in series config to charge the bank, and use an appropriately rated charge controller. Because in parallel configuration, the solar modules' current are addative- so with a max current of around 5.5 amps per panel observed, thos panels in parallel did charge the 12v bank at a maximum of around 22 amps. But in series, the same array is limited by the maximum current that will pass through a single module, so I can only charge the 48v nominal bank at a max of 5.5a again. That means that my 48v array, consisting of 4x 12v 100w panels is actually only capable of producing around 315w. Still not too bad, but I recently purchased a pair of renology 24v 300w panels. These have a max current rating of 9.3 amps, and being that they are 24v, I only need 2 of them to get the 48v nominal to charge the aux propulsion bank. I have not yet had a chance to install them, but this is exiting to me because it should effectively almost double the duty cycle I can get out of the system. 

 I still needed to have 12v available for the house systems, so I installed an "intelligent" 30a 48v to 12v converter. This was the simplest solution I could think of to marry the 48 volt system I built for the auxiliary propulsion to the 12 volt house systems bank. 

Oh, and in case anyone was wondering, the boat does around 5 statute mph with the motor controller drawing 30a (max rating is 32a), with a pirhana prop for the old Johnson mounting 5.5 pitch veins

I still have an old evinrude 140 that I converted the vro to a dual stack of standard pumps to run premix (I am a long time Mechanic and know better than to trust those vros). She'll do 35mph all day long on the 2 stroke, but unless I'm in a hurry or trying to outrun a storm, I prefer the quiet, leisurely, and economical pace of my electric conversion, as do my wife and children. 

Pleased to make everyone's acquaintance. 

-ryan

On Mon, May 18, 2020 at 8:52 AM, Randy Cain

<randylcain@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm just getting started on my complete conversion from sail to solar. I think I got the last ME1616 that Thunderstruck had in stock, sorry! I'm going with 57KWH of prismatics because, with a good bms to carefully manage SOC and balance, they will outlive me. The only issue is waiting for them to arrive from China. I am using the 4.8Kw of solar panels to charge the LiFePO4 battery and using TMS DC-DC for 12v house power. It's a 50a max inverter so there are 2 that work together to run the windlass. There are dual TMS2500 chargers for recharging from the grid when needed. There's no ICE generator. No fuel onboard at all. All above is per hull because the boat is a 34' Endeavour catamaran. My calculations theorize a 6kt continuous cruise speed with unlimited range on solar while charging and supplying house power needs.