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so the other thing here I always recommend to anybody that's going offshore and wants to be autonomous is to put as much solar on the boat as they can including powerboats I was on one uh in Miami a week or so ago at 90 foot power boat in which uh he put an aluminum Rigo over the top of the saloon and and forward he had uh I think it was six or seven kilowatts of solar up there and he'd made the air conditioning system super efficient and he can operate that boat with all the air conditioning loads in South Florida on the solar alone and of course he can't Propel the boat I mean he needs a six seven hundred he got actually two 650 horsepower engines in there but but he can run all the house systems even on a powerboat with a lot of air conditioning and other luxuries he could run a whole lot off of the solar panels oh it's real it's not a joke I totally agree 100 I've seen 50 Footers run everything on power not running the generis at all including washing machine uh dryer everything running on inverters that are recharged from a large solar array it's real it's power boaters are doing I'd say it's half our Market here in British Columbia even more power boaters that are mounting solar panels everywhere catamarans of course it's easier uh Bimini's decks walk-on solar panels all of it getting these large solar rays like you're talking about and now that the controllers take various voltages you can recharge a 48 volt Bank you can recharge a 24 at 12. there's not a lot of obstacles stopping you from recharging the battery bank and obviously they can be compatible to lithium as well the modern charge controllers what are your implications of doing these large arrays on your side what are the things that you kind of concern you and other like any gotchas that you think about for large solar rays you know you can um in household applications we serious connect the panels to get the voltage up I mean we can use much smaller conductors um but in household applications we can make sure there are no shading issues on a boat my own philosophy is to keep the panels break them up as much as possible and put an individual controller on each panel uh rather than Sirius connect them into a long stream with a single controller uh just because it's almost impossible not have shading an angle and other issues and then um if we've got even if we've got a relatively small panel we want to use full-size cells in them because in the smaller panels in the past to get the voltage up we've chopped the cells up so that we get the 32 to 40 cells that we want in a 12 volt panel well well in doing that we reduce the efficiency of the whole system now we can take maybe if we can only fit nine full size cells we'll put nine of them there we might get four and a half or five volts out of the panel we've got for the first time ever we've got boost Regulators which will take that low voltage and boost it up with a maximum PowerPoint tracking controller to 12 or 24 or 48 volts or whatever we want so My Philosophy is to is to break the panels up into individual panels for the controller on each one uh don't worry about the voltage coming out of the panel put a boost regulator on there and then we can optimize the output of all of every single panel on the boat regardless of what's going on with the other panels and shading and angles and all that kind of stuff and you get redundancy as a benefit as well you know you have multiple controllers if one fails you just lose one panel that's what I did on my boat I have seven panels seven panel uh six panels six controllers exactly and two of them are like you said their boost as opposed to Buck so the voltage has to be brought up not down uh but you're right they do exist so there's no reason to not have a high efficiency panel even if the output voltage is lower than the voltage of the battery Bank you can you just put a buck like the Jensen uh which are great great controllers um photographs of catamarans with a string of controllers like this with maybe uh 12 panels up on the deck each one with its own controller and then the output from the controllers all get tied together and back to the battery yeah um and it's a super efficient way to do it it adds obviously a bit more cost but these controllers are not that expensive agreed the other thing too the amazing thing uh nowadays is Tesla you can start having individual output aggregated output of your solar array if you're going with a victron sort of system um you can actually see what each individual controller is doing yes on your touch 50 you touch 70. and that is mind-blowing mind-blowing to have that is literally Star Trek level type of information to be able to know what your ray is doing and I've seen it where I actually see the shading from the radar the communications Tower the back I see shading and I can see a solar panel that shouldn't be and then I realize oh yeah it's the sun is actually you can see it inside and you can know what your aggregate output is individual output per solar controller it's uh it's it's a dream state dream state uh to have that level of information for troubleshooting it's incredible yeah um so any sort of downsides on your side from solar like I have owners that wonder about um reliability um do you have any take between fixed and uh the flexible or semi-flexible panels on what's your take on that it's it's quality again um those semi-flexible panels uh some of them I think now have a 10 year warranty I believe um some of the Merlin panels have a 10-year warranty on them um most have a five-year warranty of their quality panels but it's also important to make sure that the warrant is not prorated so that if it fails after four and a half years you get a new panel as opposed to being told that you've only got 10 of the warranty left and you get a 10 rebate um and if the manufacturer doesn't have the the confidence to put that kind of a warranty on the panel then I wouldn't want to put it on my boat and what's the point but if they're if they're well built and they're got a decent warranty and you don't abuse them obviously they've got to be installed properly um there's no reason why they shouldn't last for years and then the other way of course to go is to with solid rooftop style panels but the minute you take one of those and put it on a frame on a boat it no longer has a warranty you know the warranties are all based on rooftop but if you've got a solid structure that you can do that uh the cost of the panels will be a lot cheaper than the the Marine semi-flexible but by the time you include the cost of the structure you probably haven't saved anything but that that is another way to go I have on our boat because we have a hard top over the cockpit a hard Bimini um I've got that covered in rigid panels and those panels are 16 years old now and they're still putting out close to what they did when they were new um but they're they're in an area where they're not subject to damage they've never really hit by anything um and they're they're totally rigid so there's no flexing uh and um and they've held up very well but the semi-flexible panels that you can stick down on the deck and so on a terrific and the outputs on them are at least as high now as the rigid panels I mean they're using the same cells basically yeah we we've had tremendous success with these flexible so especially with the boats that have a lot of canvas uh that are just sort of you know in the sun just waiting fading in the sun uh and all that canvas is begging to have something on top and like I said the power boaters are doing this as well and aesthetically I think it's important to note aesthetically a flexible solar panel keeps the curves of the boat the same uh the profile of the boat won't change everything looks the same the moment you start introducing straight lines on a boat where everything is curved you're it's going to be some people aren't bothered by it some others are and that's one of the downsides of Ridgid is that you're gonna it's gonna look your boat's gonna become more functional potentially than it did in the past it's just harder to hide those rigid panels unless of course you have a hard top or I've seen catamaran where they're recessed which is amazing they've literally built the deck around a size of panel and you recess them you you're not walking on them but you're not even going to stub your toe arches are a great way obviously rubid Dodgers or even biminis are great so you can have one of those and that's a high candidate for a rigid panel as well but the flexibles you can mount them you know um all on the canvas and we've done the peeling stick uh with the solvians literally having the boat on large catamarans having the brow of the boat installed huge solar rays in a place of the boat where people don't really walk on and you're just sort of like you said you can you can almost offset daily power requirements if you've got a large enough solar weight even on a power boat not propulsion but stay in anchor right almost indefinitely and that in itself yeah that's a win I mean that's a huge win that's like retirement that's a that's like saying my money coming in equals my money coming out and I don't have to worry about income that's seriously for a boater to be able to stay there at an Anchorage for a period of time without having to run that generator or engine on a light load uh because you know you're not running an efficient charging system that's a huge win for everyday borders huge win huge uh that's amazing yeah if you um calculate the cost of generating electricity on a boat using a fossil fuel engine or either the propulsion engine or at anco as opposed to when you run away because then you're going to be using it anyway um but if you if you do that calculation you discover that you're paying anywhere from three dollars a kilowatt hour to twenty dollars a kilowatt hour I mean they're truly shocking numbers so when you look at the cost of solar in that context it ends up being a good investment as long as you're going to use the boat you know if the boat sits at the dock 52 weeks of the year and you never use it then uh what's the point but if you the more you use the boat the better this investment in the Solar looks and on a lot of full-time cruising boats Off the Grid cruising boats I think the payback on solar is less than a year in terms of the cost versus the cost of generating the same amount of electricity using the typically the battery charging at anchor using the main engine battery charging and anchor the solo the payback is probably less than a year and the redundancy I mean I I can't tell people Shore power losing a Shore power connection in the storms that we have sometimes or it being kicked off or a neighbor taking your short power cord tripping your breaker inside the boat not realizing when they did so plugging you back in breakers off they don't know if you have a solar array um and your loads are relatively light in the summer I can offset Refrigeration in perpetuity for five months with my solar array even on cloudy conditions and so now you know you're not going to lose your battery Bank you know if you lose your power before and you had your Refrigeration on you have a timer you know you got a week three days four days depending on the size of your battery bank and then you're going to be in a world of pain the solar is you know if it's size big enough it probably can handle like Refrigeration on your boat without a sweat and it can do that in the summer months when the refrigeration is on when we're not on board that's another big win of solar battery banks are lasting longer they're not discharging as deep as frequently yeah yeah there's so many great wins with solar so I say that's another hidden cost benefit where the solar will maintain your batteries in a higher average state of charge so if they're lead acid batteries that has a disproportionate impact on their life expectancy so there's a there's a hidden benefit there which can be if you've got a large lead asset battery Bank can be quite substantial and yeah as borders are chasing yeah you're right and the battery banks are getting bigger I mean what they used to be 30 years ago 40 years ago and what they are today is it's not an incremental change I mean it's multiples you know uh at least double what it used to be if not more and some people are chasing these large banks have bang battery banks that were inconceivable in the past and now with the solar being there they're not cycling that battery Bank as deep as before they're letting it go deep at night but in the daytime they're pretty much almost going to get to 100 with solar and solar alone yep so which is huge win huge win in terms of longevity for your battery bank and and having a battery bank that's reliable for pretty much most of the battery life right because if it's not working too hard it's working but not working too hard you're going to have a much longer battery life and Cycles which is again another not that solar needs more wins but that's another good win on top of it it's like the cherry on top of the cherry on top of a pretty nice Sunday so if you're curious again go on our website and find out more answers and solutions with this sort of setup and thanks for asking and thanks for all of you for listening and tuning in English (auto-generated) Videolytics    Tools