Off the grid

 Before we brought the boat south in 2019, we installed solar panels on the aft arch but I didn't have the time to hook them up.  I have all the components to do such, just lots of wire running in tight spaces.  We have a generator to top off the batteries so it was never an issue, power-wise, just noisy if we were down below.

I did add a battery monitor, to keep up to speed on the energy draw.  It has Bluetooth and can be configured with an app on my iPhone.


I recently powered up the solar panel controller to configure it, again using  Bluetooth on the same app.  The two components can chat with each other to let each know what's going on---solar charging, battery discharging, temperature, etc.


The controller can take the energy coming from the panels, wired in series, at 96 VDC/800 watts and convert it into battery-friendly 12VDC to keep the batteries topped off.  We keep 4 larger wet cells, good for 200 aH, and this provides us with more than a day's energy usage while living on board.

The app for all this is very nice, with lots of tweaks that can be made for custom configurations.

With the app connecting by Bluetooth, any boat with similar equipment can be seen.  Acadia is a nearby dock mate.






Nothing to see on for the solar controller as the panels are not hooked up yet.



The battery monitor is useful, especially to find what items on board draw the most amps and what the current State of Charge for the battery bank.
I'll probably add one more piece to the puzzle that allows connection to Wi-Fi so I can see how things are going on the boat, electrically speaking.




Comments

  1. Paul ClarkJanuary 19, 2021 at 12:46 AM

    On a similar note - I recently downloaded the McDonald's app. I haven't really explored it's full functionality, but it looks like it has a lot of potential...

    ReplyDelete

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