At the Boat Show we managed to attend 2 (free!) mini lectures, the second of which was on ‘Electrics for Boaters’ with Tony Brooks.
Tony is an instructor offering boaters’ courses and technical help. His site with some good technical notes on it can be found here.
He only had 20 minutes to speak and focused on calculating how much battery capacity you actually need to have on your boat.
Here are the highlights…
- Turn all electrical items off on your boat. Then one by one, turn each item on and off to determine how many amps each item on your boat draws (eg lamp uses 3.4 amps, pump uses 5 amps).
- Estimate how many hours you use each item for per day (eg lamp used 2 hours, pump used 2 hours).
- Multiply each item’s amps by the # hours/day used – this will give you amphours per day per item (3.4×2=6.8 and 5×2=10).
- Add up all the amphours of all the items together (6.8+10=16.8 amphours).
- This tells you the amount of usuable battery capacity needed.
BUT
- You can’t use 100% of any battery all in one day!
- In fact, you should only use up 50% of the charge in your batteries each day (otherwise you significantly shorten the battery’s life).
- AND you can only realistically charge the battery to 80% of its so-called total rated capacity.
- Therefore really only 30% of the battery’s claimed capacity is available to you (80%-50%=30%).
Then calculate battery capacity
- 16.8 amphours per day is only 30% of rated battery capacity needed. So how many amphours of rated capacity do you actually need?
- Solve for x:
- 16.8/x = 30/100
- x = 56 amphours needed per day
So 1×110 ah batteries should be enough.
On the other hand, if you only charge your battery every third day, then you’ll need 168 amphours and should do fine with 2×110 ah batteries.
Listening to this lecture also showed us… we don’t know a thing about engines yet either. Hmm.
So the Can Opener will be trolling the electrics section in our Don Casey’s Sailboat Maintenance Manual as well. And the RYA marine Electrics course has also been bumped up the list…
Have you ever done an energy audit?
Find any surprises?
–Captain Cat
(transcribed by the Can Opener)
Cruising Lectures
Next: Chuck Paine Speaks
Previously: Diesel Bug