EP 41 - Solar Installation on a Sailboat: Installing a Full River Battery Bank - Part 3

Hey Gang! This is the final installment in the 3 part series of our Solar Installation on Reverie. We went with a combination of Full River AGM Batteries and Bluetti Lithium Power Generator. This was an important part of our sailboat restoration. On this episode we are installing our new Full River Battery Bank. We went with Full River 12V 105AH Batteries. We installed a set of 4 batteries in parallel that provide us with 420AH at 12V. Based on Don Casey's books he recommends treating your Lead Acid batteries as if they were Lithium. So our plan is to use our new battery bank planning on discharge of 50% - 80%. If were to do this at 80% discharge consistently, we would only lose about 8-9% of the overall battery life over time. For the price of the batteries, we can live with that. Now that said, our house bank is there for our lighting, electronics, pumps, cooktop and supporting an inverter for our computers and other small draw equipment. So with solar constantly charging the bank, I think it would hard for us to discharge more than 50% on a regular basis. That said, we would go as far as 80% as needed. Our refrigerator for Reverie is a Dometic CFX Dual Zone. This fridge runs on both 120V AC and 12V DC. It is extremely efficient. We will be using a Bluetti Power Station which is equivalent of two Lithium Batteries stuck in a suitcase. It has a built in MPPT Controller and a 1000W Inverter built in. In our testing we can run the Dometic Fridge from this unit for 4 days straight without recharging the unit. Since the Bluetti can be charged from Solar this is why we split one of the panels at the breaker so we can route power to the Bluetti to recharge. We repurpose the old batteries to serve as our engine startup batteries. While it is overkill to have two batteries for our little Yanmar engine it is nice to have the redundancy for now. When these old batteries die we will go back to a single. This is a neat transformation as we use the space where there were 2 batteries to fit 4 of our new Full River batteries. We feel you will find this useful.