If You're Interested in Getting Solar on a Sailboat, This is the Episode You NEED to Watch!

So after a couple of months of not posting we finally got around to putting all of the footage together for our solar project. November was a tough month for us as we had to make trips to Puerto Rico for my father's pacemaker surgery and two weeks later again to see our family for my mother-in law's birthday, my parents anniversary and thanksgiving after been away from family due to covid for almost two years. So as you can imagine not much got done. That said during December we took time to keep moving our sailboat restoration forward so we piece time together to get the solar project done. As always everything takes longer than expected when you are working with a boat. We build our new tray to hold our solar panels. A Big Thank You! To Tristen from JSD Welding and Fabrication. Great guy helped me get this project started the right way. From there we install, tested and wire our panels. We installed our new Victron Charge Controllers, Victron Lynx Distribution Box, and Fullriver Batteries On this video we cover everything through getting the wires inside the boat. We wanted to keep it under 15 minutes so Part 2 Video will cover the new battery setup and setup for all charge controllers and wiring inside the boat. There will also be a possible third video (depends if it does not make it into Part 2) where we share a complete diagram of the components and setup of our solar array. It is a AGM/Lithium combination. Here is the timeline in case you want to skip around: 00:00 - Introduction 01:34 - Test fitting the Solar Panels & Tristen's Story 02:41 - Solar Panel Test Fiting & Planning 03:57 - Meet Tristen & Bimini Frame Transformation & Solar Panel Tray Installation 06:05 - Securing & Testing Panels 07:56 - MC4 Connectors & tools 09:47 - Wiring, Wiring Run & SeaView Seal 11:39 - SeaView Seal Installation 12:23 - Walk-through of completed Outer Setup 12:56 - Wrap-Up