Wiring

Shore Power electrical progress

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Feels like solid progress for an all electric boat today 😊

Our shore power is now connected to a waterproof 32 amp Victron socket in the cockpit. From there it goes through a Victron 7000watt Isolation Transformer and then our Victron Multiplus II (combined 5000watt Inverter and 70 amp battery charger). Then onwards to the boats mains ac consumer unit. The rest is temporarily wired in extension leads at present.

Now I can work on the 48volt battery bank, connect that to the MultiPlus. And then we can get the solar connected so that we stop paying so much for boatyard electricity.

Mast preparation continued

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With a beautiful day we had a nice slow morning with family and then got back to preparing our main and mizzen masts for painting (well we also washed the dinghy and equipment).

We now have all the wiring out of the main mast.

We have put messenger lines in for them all.

We have removed both winches (a single speed Lewmar 8 and a double speed Lewmar 16, neither self tailing) and all other fittings showing any corrosion.

I was a bit annoyed by the winch mounts. The winches has been fitted with bolts that were too long and so instead of beinfg simply bolted to the winch mount some of them has gone into the mast itself. That has caused more corrosion and extra holes.

So everything is off and the masts have had a wash including a wash of the inside with a hose.

We have decided we don’t have to do a perfect job immediately, so we have not removed anything that we still need and that isn’t showing any corrosion eg spreader roots, spinnaker pole track. Similarly we have decided not to remove winches and cleats from the mizzen (upgrades can come later).

Tomorrow, is clean with acetone, sand, clean and get a coat of primer on. Then we can fill holes we don’t need to reuse with thickened epoxy, then we can sand and clean before a 2nd coat of primer. That then buys us some time for the rest of the work as the aluminium won’t be able to oxidise.

Another task has been looking at all the hardware we need to fit to the masts.

We are now looking at re-purposing the existing Lewmar 16ST for our mainsail reefing. Then 2 Harken 20ST for the halyards. If we can find something suitable secondhand then we will go for that instead.

We are only going to fit 3 actual halyards and supporting hardware at the moment (Yankee or Genoa, Staysail, Main) but with messenger lines for 2nd headsail, trysail and spinnaker.

We are also going to upgrade from cleats to Rope Constrictors for these halyards, skipping all the generations of clutches. Rope Constrictors are about twice the price of a standard clutch but they don’t damage the Halyard at all. But a replacement Halyard is about three times the extra cost. We have found 2 sources Ronstan and Cousin Trestec.

We are going to replace the tired halyard exit sheeves with the newer, simpler plates (and go from 2 to 5 of them so we have support for all the halyards we will ever need.

We have decided to simplify the lighting. We don’t have a simple way to fit lights to the spreaders and get the cables into the conduit at the front of the mast. That means keeping the deck light and the steaming light on the mast Deck light is lower than the spreaders, steaming light is above. However, it looks even simpler to get a combination LED steaming and deck light. One less cable to run up the mast.

Anyway, painting and filling is the first priority. All the fittings can wait for a while.

Battery bank installation progress

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Today has included a huge amount of lifting and moving. A large part of that was lifting all 8 batteries on board. You can see the preparation for this in Low down progress

First battery bank has a nearly finished box (needs final epoxy coating and painting plus a lid).

The second battery bank will sit on top.

We need to make some changes to the floor supports. We will fit a new central floor board that will be the watertight lid of the top battery bank.

The top bank will also be 4 batteries and is both longer and wider than the lower bank. The hull shape means the batteries take up a lot less space this way round. Fortunately we have bluetooth access to the BMS of the lower batteries (and the top one that will be under the steps).

We are going to make sure that even if the bilge filled with water our batteries would not get wet (and there will be no exposed battery connections under the water at that point).

Anyway the bilge that water flows into is nearly a metre deeper that where the batteries are, that bilge will have an automatic electric bilge pump, a high water alarm and a manual bilge pump.

Building a “sofa”

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The other day we made Lee Boards for our starboard saloon berth. Today we’ve started the process of making them adapt to their other role which is to be a backrest.

It isn’t finished yet. I need to find a way to retain the back rests so they can’t fall forward. Also add a brace to the middle of the length. We might also reduce the gaps between them as it is higher than needed.

Once we are happy then Jane will add padding to them.

It might not be obvious from the photos but I have lowered the bottom Lee Board so that your legs don’t touch it.

It was a bit of a damp day today but we made a bit of progress outside. We worked with Steve to move an unclaimed mast out of the way. It has been alongside us for ages but had recently been moved a bit and was blocking a often used route to the clubhouse. Now it is completely out of the way. The boatyard also cut down all the grass and weeds growing up around our main mast so we were able to a small amount of work on it.

The parts we need to refurbish the masts have started to arrive. More in the next few days. We are currently thinking about the wiring we need to install and how we can ensure they don’t rattle or chafe inside the mast. The mizzen mast doesn’t have any conduit or any means of protecting/controlling the wires. We don’t yet know what the main mast has.

A lot the work on the masts is going to be weather dependent so we will progress it when we can. Meanwhile there are plenty more things we can do inside 😊

Confusing earth wiring

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When buying Vida, our surveyor included concerns about the earth.

We knew that the engine was “earthed” by a jump lead to the stern tube (and the jump lead was very rusty).

I’ve just found these wires connected to the anode that is bolted through the hull.

Quite a collection! We have green/yellow, back, blue and red!

Hardly surprising that the earth wasn’t working!

#Oops

Now we are definitely going to 48volt house battery bank

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This answers our pondering House Battery Bank: Should we go 48 volt

So we managed to get these two items from the clearance section at Energy Solutions.

The new MultiPlus II (looks like a decent upgrade from the original MultiPlus). Sized with a 48 volt, 5000 Watt inverter and a 70 amp charger. For the price of a much less powerful 48 volt charger on it’s own.

We had planned to have two smaller MultiPlus units to give some redundancy. We don’t really need that before we set off world cruising so we can wait and add a second smaller one in a few years. The feature set is amazing. For example we can have two power circuits on the boat and one of them will only be supplied if we have shorepower or a generator running. Also we can tell it the shorepower capacity and it will make sure it doesn’t overload it. It can do all kinds of clever stuff mixing shorepower, battery and solar in clever ways (that will mean that we can minimise our shorepower usage as the solar is prioritised).

The Isolation Transformer was an even bigger bargain, the case has some damage (looks like it was dropped onto one corner hard enough to bend the side and bottom panels). It can support a 32 amp 7.0kvA mains supply. It handles 230v and 120v, sorts reversed polarity and protects us from electrical currents that can cause metal fittings on the boat to corrode.

We are very much looking forward to getting these installed (might need to do some weight training to get the MultiPlus II up the ladder and it will need a very strong bulkhead to be fastened to).

Late evening progress

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Well we arrived at Vida at 11.20pm and decided it was worth connecting our new mains consumer unit before bed.

We can now use the full 16amp boatyard supply. At the moment I’ve wired in a couple of extension leads. Already a nice tidy up possible from the way we have managed with a “consumer” unit designed for tents.

We are using a cheap domestic consumer unit at the moment. Obviously not a long term solution, but our plans are not stable enough yet to get a marine one which we will probably need to make a custom cabinet for.

House Battery Bank: Should we go 48 Volt?

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While we wrote Going 100% electric: the “house” after Going 100% electric: the Motor we had in fact made most of the decisions around the house electrical system before we made the decision that we would go straight to an electric motor instead of the diesel.

Now we are thinking about making a change. The things prompting us to consider a change include:

  • The high cost of 48 volt battery chargers. We do need the option of charging our battery bank when in a marina or harbour (or even ashore in the boatyard). We can imagine spending sometime alongside in winter or even popping every so often just to get the batteries fully charged (the expectation of needing to live in colder climates in Winter is influenced by both Covid and Brexit which might limit our options for where we spend our time).
  • We think our house battery bank has ended up a bit small (4 x 120AH) and so are going to be needing to charge it from the Motor bank (4 x 300AH) quite often.
  • Having two battery banks at different voltages ends up creating quite a lot of extra complication.
  • With one exception (the anchor windlass) we have realised that our 12 volt usage is relatively low (LED lighting, boat instruments, water pumps).
  • While we have specified really thick cabling with big busbars and fuses, it is challenging to power 2 x 2,000 watt inverters from a 12 volt battery bank. The current that we need to safely pass is huge and this is where the vast majority of our house consumption will be (induction hobs, microwave, multi-cooker, watermaker, water heater).
  • We didn’t understand enough about how you can power 12 volt systems from a 48 volt battery bank. We thought they were too inefficient but have now realised that we either incur that inefficiency when charging a 12 volt battery bank from the 48 volt bank for all house uses OR when using a 12 volt house appliance (but not a mains powered item from a 48 volt inverter). The total losses are much smaller if we incur them only as we need the 12 volt power rather than to keep a whole batery bank charged.
  • We deliberately chose 4 batteries for the house bank that had enough output so they could be re-wired to be a 48 volt battery bank for the motor if the main bank failed. However, it would take ages to do. So a bigger 48 volt bank with two sets of 4 batteries wired in series and then the sets connected in parallel gives immediate access.

So a little maths about the issue with power over 12v cables.

P = power in watts (W)
V = voltage in volts (V)
I = current in amps (A)

Power = Current x Voltage or P = I x V

Switching it around we have I = P / V
So 4,000 watts from 12 volts = 4,000 / 12 = 333 Amps
Whereas on a 48 volt system we have 83 Amps

More amps = thicker cables and lots of care to avoid melting connections or high losses.

The disadvantages of changing from a 12 volt hour battery bank

Our current thinking

  • As we install them, we will configure all 8 batteries as a single 48 volt battery bank. This is pretty straightforward.
  • We will sell our unused 2 x 2,000 watt Victron Phoenix inverters (get in touch if you are interested).
  • We will use our Victron Orion 48 volt DC to 12 volt DC converter to power all our 12 volt appliances. We can always add extra Orion’s to run together if we need more power (eg for the electric auto-pilot)
  • It would be very expensive to add enough Orion’s to provide all the 1,500 watts at 12 volts for the windlass. So we will add a 12 volt battery close to the windlass. When the windlass isn’t being used we can charge the battery through the standard 12 volt system.
  • We will add 2 x 48 volt 3,000 watt Victon Multi-plus charger/inverters (2 of them to provide redundancy, we can run appliances with some limitations off one of them).

The Multi-plus inverters are smart. They provide mains power to the boat circuit and they automatically take that power from a shore power connection or if that isn’t available from the battery bank. When connected to shore power they automatically charge the battery bank. Two of them can put a total 70 amps into the battery bank.

We will have a 48 Volt battery bank with a total capacity of 1,680 AH (4 x 300 plus 4 x 120). Suppose we arrive at a marina with it fully depleted (ie down to 10% charge). That means we need to put in 90% of 1,680Ah which is 1,512 AH. At 70 Amps charging we are talking about 21 hours to fully recharge the battery bank (realistically we would expect many marinas to be limited to either 16A or 32A supplies so this will be a lot slower). Gradually we would expect marinas to upgrade their electric supply as the number of electric boats increases.

While there are costs to this change it does simplify a number of things, particularly with cabling and charging. All our charging goes into the one battery bank without having to switch solar panels between banks or do inefficient bank to bank charging.

It gives us much simpler use of the battery capacity as we can choose how we allocate the available power between house and motor. For example if we are not going anywhere and expect some sunny days in a while we can use all the capacity for the house. Or if we are motoring up a river to a marina all the house capacity is available for the motor.

In the long term we would expect more boat appliances to be available in 48 volt versions which will gradually reduce the need for DC to DC converters.

We haven’t made a final decision on this yet, but it does look like we are heading this way at the moment.

Into 2nd wave lockdowns

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So a quick update on where we are at. The situation for Manchester is still chaos without agreement between the national and local governments regarding the level of lockdown we should be in. However, we are expecting to be more restricted soon (bearing in mind that Manchester has had it’d own lockdown for months anyway). As for travelling to Wales it is hard to find clear guidance as to whether the Welsh government have now made it illegal to travel from either tier 2 (High) or 3 (Very High). We took the view that it would have been wrong to go on Thursday when a ban was expected from 6pm on Friday (still unclear if that has happened). There now seems to be an expectation that a Welsh “Circuit Break” ban for a few weeks will be announced in the morning. We are working on the assumption that we might not be able to get to the boat again this year.

Fortunately we left her in good shape, the most watertight yet. So we are not worried about any problems on board.

We have some jobs we can do at home, while many of these are not urgent as far as launching is concerned they will at least allow us to feel we are making some progress while we can’t get to the boat.

Propeller Shaft: I wrote about the pitting issues in my last post. As none of the pitting is where bearings or seals go we decided to try to tackle it. Where there is pitting which is probably caused by electrical currents – either through poor earthing (electrolytic) or by currents between dissimilar metals (galvanic) – we are going to remove it. Pitting encourages more corrosion. The best way to avoid corrosion in stainless steel is a bright mirror polish and to have not used any other metals (eg saws or files) to achieve it.

So I have started removing the pitting using the angle grinder with a flap sanding disk. None of it is deeper than about 1mm. So far I’ve done about half of it (starting with the worst bits).

Once I have used the 80grit flap sanding disk to remove the pitting the shaft is no longer perfectly round and is definitely not smooth or polished. So I have 50m of a 25mm wide strip of 80 grit Emery Cloth. Using a strip of this wrapped around the shaft it should be possible to get it pretty smooth and round. I then have finer grades to remove the scratches before using a paste with a cloth to polish it as smooth as possible.

That should keep me busy for hours. A new propeller shaft would be a simpler solution but this should be perfectly serviceable for a few more years and saves waste.

Motor Mount brackets: I have the 4 angle brackets that will be bolted to the original engine bearers and which the flexible mounts will be bolted to. Just got another 10 or more holes to drill in them (10mm). That will leave only the 4 holes in the motor frame for the flexible mounts (not quite sure what size they are and the position isn’t finalised yet).

Domestic Battery Box: I’ve got to make some cut-outs in the timber for the nuts where the leads bolt to the busbar so that the busbars can be fitted. I can also make a lid (and adjust the design for a new expectation that the batteries will be lowered into it via opening the cockpit floor).

Motor Throttle Our motor throttle has a 6mm square shaft and I need to make or find a control lever for it. Trying to find something that doesn’t cost much, is reliable and doesn’t look clunky.

Motor Controller Heatsink: I want to get a really big and effective (and cheap) heatsink for the controller (because apparently they get really hot). My idea is so mount this through the (to be built) bulkhead between the motor compartment and the cockpit locker. This way the heat gets put into the cockpit locker while the controller is away from it in the motor compartment.

Dinghy: Jane has nearly finished the cover for the dinghy. I need to get and fit removable launching wheels to get it over the mixture of rocks and shingle where we will launch it.

Solar Panel mounts: I should be able to make everything I need to mount the solar panels to to the boat both on the wheelhouse roof and at the guardrails.

Propeller: We have the propeller at home and it still needs a lot of cleaning. One day money permitting we will replace it with a Bruntons Autoprop Ecostar, until then cleaning it is.

Emergency Steering: The two part emergency tiller (if the wheel steering breaks) has probably been in storage under the after cabin bunk for the whole life of the boat. There has been a little corrosion which means the parts no longer fit together. So we will fix this.

Consumer Unit mount: We now have a consumer unit for the mains power. We have a place for it which will allow us to access the trip switches. It is quite large as we have one switch for each of the 13 sockets we will have around the boat, we are running a separate wire to each rather than a ring main. However, it will need to be lowered for full access so I’m making a wooden frame for it to slide up and down in.

Navigation and control systems: I have plenty of fun planned getting Raspberry Pi computers sorted to run the chart plotter and other navigation software. I want them to interface with all our instruments, with the battery management systems, the solar charge controllers etc. We will have an indoor and an outdoor Pi so we can see everything when steering or when below. The indoor one will also be our entertainment centre and office computer.