Work Progress

It has been a while since our last blog entry, mainly because there were several projects in motion but few results.

After our return from the 5-day car tour of the North Island we got back to work on the boat.

Bruce and his colleague "Tommo" had done a brilliant job of fitting the four big gel batteries into the boat. Two were sited under the cockpit above the large Delkor engine-starting batteries. The other two were sited under the port and starboard seats in the main cabin. This meant that the weight was distributed evenly on the port-starboard axis and the weight of two of the batteries was in the aft section of the boat, visibly raising the bow in the water. The rest of this week was spent fitting the 160-amp alternator and its two belt pulleys as well as several other jobs.

The result is that we now have three banks of batteries:

1. "House" bank of 4 new gel batteries yielding 928 amp hours
2. Engine "starting" bank of the two existing Delkor seal batteries yielding about 260 amp hours.
3. "Auxiliary" bank of one ACM gel battery of 55 amp hours that drives the anchor winch.

The pre-existing 50-amp alternator charges the starting batteries and when they are full the charging is automatically directed to the winch battery. The 160-amp alternator charges the house batteries. It has been set up with an external regulator which will yield faster charging than its internal one.

The entire system is monitored by a display that reports:

1. Voltage of each bank
2. Net amperage of the house bank - that is the net result of subtracting the amps going out from the amps going in from the alternator, solar panels, and wind charger
3. The capacity of the batteries still available in amp hours and as a percentage of total capacity

The large "make before break" switch that enabled us to supply the boat power from bank 1 or bank 2 has been replaced by three switches: one for the house bank, one for the starter bank, and one for a crossover when one bank is totally dead. Thus to start the engine we turn on the switch of the "starter" bank and the engine starts using this bank quite independently of the house bank. This has the important benefit of eliminating the voltage drops which stopped the chart plotter and gas sniffer every time we started the engine.

One photo shows the new gel batteries stacked on the pre-existing Delkor starting batteries under the cockpit. Another photos shows the three new manual switches in the bottom and the power monitoring display at the top left. The third photos shows the new alternator and belt arrangement.