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hi everyone jeff cote here at

our boating tech talk shooting studio

so here we've got a question from a

fellow boater asking about

solar and what to do uh in the offseason

so uh the question goes jeff i'm leaving

the boat for six months on the hard

should i disconnect all the appliances

and leave solar to charge

that's a good question we had one of our

clients here from british columbia

because we're filming here in vancouver

british columbia

on the west coast of north america

and this client took off and went to

mexico and also

same similar situation left the boat on

the hard for six months and i remember

getting an email

from our client asking jeff what should

i do so i actually

i kind of like the idea of having solar

panels

maintain your batteries while someone is

away and you don't even have to connect

shore power at all you don't even have

to worry if the marina is going to

disconnect that cord if a neighbor is

going to disconnect that chord if a

trade

is going to disconnect that chord you

don't even have to worry about anything

and so what i would do yes i would

suggest to make sure that you disconnect

all loads

except maybe the belch pump i've

actually seen

boats actually be flooded on the heart

uh sometimes it does happen

you might have a leak on your boat you

might getting a lot more rain water than

you think you will

so make sure that the bilge pump is

always connected to your batteries

even if you're on the heart it's pretty

disheartening to have

a flooded boat on the heart it's almost

unimaginable uh it would be

disheartening

to say the least and so you want to make

sure that your

bilge pumps are at least connected if

you've got an alarm system

a low voltage alarm again that would be

good because people that are walking

around your boats might actually hear a

beeping sound and might want to come on

board or ask tell the marina

so monitoring and bilge pumps would be

things that i would leave

connected to the battery that said i

think having solar panels

going to a controller or in controller

going to the battery is a really good

idea

so i would do that because it's going to

top off your batteries in in this case

uh the border has 7515 solar controllers

which is sort of

the smaller version of the 130 this is

100 volts max 30 amperage

this motor has a solar controller that's

75.15

and they have 200 watt solar panels so

it's a 200 watt array

which is reasonable and so every day

they're going to be recharging the

batteries and that would be a good idea

to maintain especially in this case

where they're agm batteries it's a good

way to

make sure that your agm batteries don't

discharge over time

even though they discharge slower and

also this is a key

having a battery discharge slowly over

time especially an agm battery

and not recharging it and waiting six

months

is pretty much not death but it's going

to cause some

serious premature aging of your agm

battery bank

so i strongly suggest to keep your solar

panels and controller connect to the

battery disconnect all loads

except bilge pump and some monitoring so

that would be my advice

great question thanks for asking

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