1) Understanding your energy needs is essential to determine how much solar you need. Start by making an "energy budget". List all your consumers and their daily usage. For example, if your LED lights use 1W per bulb and you have eight bulbs on for 5 hours a day, that would be 8 Watts for 5 hours or (8x5) 40 Wh (Watt hours). I like to use kWh to keep things consistent. 40 Wh = 0.040 kWh. It's a good idea to list what you're using while at anchor and another list of what you're using while underway (for instance, you don't use your autopilot at anchor). Remember to list everything: fridge, freezer, watermaker, autopilot, nav lights, chart plotters, etc. For example, here aboard Athena, with an electric galley, fridge, freezer, watermaker, two computers, etc, we use an average of 5.5 kWh per day. 2) To give you a quick estimate, use https://globalsolaratlas.info/ to find "Global horizontal irradiation" per day for your location. Take your daily energy consumption from step 1 and divide that by the number of solar hours. In the case of Athena, located in the Caribbean, that would be 5.5kWh per day / 5 sun hours = 1.1 kW solar array. Keep in mind that this is a theoretical number that does not take into account the shading or degradation of the panels over time. Let's add 30%. 1.1 x 1.3 = 1.43 kW. You can now divide that number by the panel's Nominal Power output. In the case of Athena, our panels are 400W SunPower panels. 1430W / 400W = 3.6 panels needed to cover our 5.5 kWh per day consumption. 3) Understand that the amount of solar you can install on a small sailboat is limited by the size of the boat and heavily influenced by shading and, of course, the boat's location. The size of the panels might also be defined by the height of your stanchions or the size of an existing solar arch. Figure out where you're able and willing to install panels. That will dictate the size and number of panels. 4) Use Victron Energy's MPPT Calculator to calculate what MPPT is ideally sized for your solar panels and expected output based on location. Based on our experience in the Caribbean, the estimate provided by the guide is reasonable. https://www.victronenergy.com/mppt-calculator. Remember that it's best practice to avoid combining panels with different specs on the same MPPT. #sailboat #sailboatproject #boatwork #saillife #liveaboard #liveaboardlife #saltlife #sailing #sailingadventure #travel ingcouple #livingonaboat #solar #sailboatsolar

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Diving the Banda Sea - Shorts - The Forgotten Islands - Banda Sea, Indonesia. A Diving Trip with Master Liveaboard into this amazing region. We had a UW-photography workshop with Gerald Rambert. IG - https://www.instagram.com/gerald_rambert/ . I hope you'll enjoy this video! If you have any questions, please leave a comment down below. Music: https://www.storyblocks.com/audio Voiceover: https://murf.ai/text-to-speech AI Invideo (10 minutes are free!): https://invideo.io/i/pyu Join me on Instagram: Everything big - https://www.instagram.com/project_yet_unknown_all/ Everything small - https://www.instagram.com/project_yet_unknown/ Check out my pictures on ... Scopio: http://bit.ly/2OtkRLg Wirestock: https://wirestock.io/peter.jantsch

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Just Catamarans is the exclusive dealer of Outremer Catamarans in North America. Contact Sales@@JustCatamarans.net

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Hairy conditions on Thursday of Cowes Week which was also the third day of the XOD Centenary regatta. We're aboard XOD Class Captain William Norris's Beatrix with Vernon Nock (64) in the front of the boat and International Foiling Moth sailor (!) Peter Barton on the helm. William couldn't be aboard that day because he was on the Royal Yacht Squadron Platform with the Princess Royal who fired the starting cannon for this special race. In his place was Yachting World editor David Glenn. Unfortunately Beatrix was OCS which was apparently made clear to William Norris by the Princess Royal as the sail numbers were duly called out. We hope he didn't lay the blame too firmly at YW's doorstep! Despite the hiccup it was a truly great day's racing followed by a superb Centenary dinner party for 400 back in Cowes.

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