Re: [electricboats] Recommendations for a windmill/charge controller?

I'm glad to see someone doing the math, but it's still looking at the issue from the opposite side as me. I'm sitting at anchor in Man Of War Harbor in Key West, terribly open to the north and with winds at about 20 gusting higher, and my Rutland 1200 is doing the job almost exactly like you're describing.

But the job it does, for me, is more often about lesser winds. It provides a charge of between 2 and 10 amps, most of the time, and 0-1 amp in even in very light winds because it's designed for a low start speed. It maxes out sooner than some, but who wants to listen to a wind generator when you're already freaked out by being anchored in such strong winds? That doesn't sound like a lot, but it's 24/7 and that means I continue to (at least) trickle charge while the boats around me are drawing down overnight or on cloudy days. It also means I easily use my chartplotter (with radar, even) all night without deeply drawing down the battery bank I'm on. Yes, we leave it on while sailing. If you have a topping lift for your main, you'll need to assure you don't leave it too slack. Otherwise you're golden.

It makes a big difference in the lifespan of an AGM battery to get a full charge on it. With two banks, I can get one to 100% while using the other and then switch. We have such a good load to charge ratio that we often have them both at 100% at the same time. Our Lifelines AGM batteries are 14 years old and going strong.

I'm going to find out how that translates to 48v charging within the next couple months and I'll be able to speak more specifically to the question at hand, but I'm firmly convinced (as a full time cruiser who has only taken a slip two days out of the last year) that wind power gives my system a robustness that piling on more solar panels will not.

Side note as a person always trying to avoid catastrophic failure and planning on how to handle small ones, I prefer keeping my solar on a larger number of controllers. Redundancy is good, and if a controller goes down I can double the panel up with another (if they're more or less on the same plane with the sun). I wouldn't be comfortable with one Uber controller that could turn an inevitable equipment failure into a tragic one.

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