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'...