Lynne and I were relaxing in the cockpit and enjoying the sun when Alvero glided past aboard the club launch "Nuevo" and shouted across that our package had arrived and it was waiting in the office. Once I had collected it we then proceeded to unpack our cables and the all important charge controller, all this took a relatively short time to install, primarily because we had thought it through in advance.
The two 100 watt panels are mounted on the bimini, these are the smallest and most efficient panels available 22% efficient apparently, they are also flexible , extremely light (less than 2 kilos) and connected by cables with waterproof connectors to the Charge controller. The panels are held in place by shockcord which follows the string and knicker elastic principle, namely if its held together with string and knicker elastic it can be repaired with string and knicker elastic. All nicely colour coordinated too I think you'll agree......they can also quickly be mounted on the guardrails. The charge controller is the brains of the system and regulates the current flowing from the panels to the batteries to prevent overcharging and is even clever enough to recognise when night has fallen, this is important because if the panels were connected directly to the batteries at night they would actually take electricity out of the batteries. The complete opposite of what we want. It also monitors battery temperature and a host of other parameters. Clever thing!
Almost immediately lots of lovely amps were being delivered to the batteries. We are now running a small experiment during which we have switched off the shore power battery charger and we are relying completely on wind and solar power to charge the house batteries. Its all looking very promising, we are listening to internet radio via a laptop connected to the 12 volt supply which gives quite a high load of 2-4 amps along with the fridge running 24 hours a day and the batteries are very close to float voltage most of the time. (13.4 volts ) We are lucky that its been very hot and sunny for the last few days.
I have also reinstalled the seawater pump after Roberto replaced the seals. We ran the engine up to temperature and there were no leaks evident. We have ordered a spare pump from the UK as this is such a vital part. I was once told there are three ways to prevent a diesel from running, put water in the fuel, stop cooling it so it overheats or shoot it with a canon. At least we can be confident on two of those!
The refurbished pump, For the observant, yes we do have two raw water inlets just in case one gets blocked by a plastic bag for example we can switch over to the other one which is three feet away so likely to be clear. Dark Tarn has a lot of built in redundancy like this.
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