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Shorts Lumikha
The Lassithi Plateau at the island of Crete is a wide, fertile plain over 800 meters above sea level, surrounded by peaks, dotted with villages and fields as far as the eye could see. One of the first things we noticed was a row of stone windmills. There were about 20 in view, but once, there were over 10,000 of them! These windmills used to pump water from the ground for irrigation – a lifeline for agriculture here. The Lassithi Plateau has long been the agricultural heart of eastern Crete, with a unique microclimate and plenty of groundwater. Even today, the 18 villages around the plateau live primarily from farming. We flew our drone to capture this sweeping valley from above – the perfect blend of natural beauty and human ingenuity.
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