Where does your power come from? When you plug in your phone, computer, your refrigerator, is it a thoughtless action or do you stop to consider where the electricity is coming from and how much of it you are using?
Before I moved onto a boat, I never gave too much thought about power generation, other than paying the power bill that was sent to me each month. Now, it’s a different ball game.
Since we spend all of our time off-grid, that means that we have to generate and maintain our own power. Gone are the days of mindlessly plugging in the laptop or phone whenever the mood strikes. Now, we must actively watch how much power we are generating and how much we are using.
How do we generate power?
Let’s take a look at what the power situation was like when we first purchased Soltara, and what it looks like now…
Power Generation
Wind
When we bought our Tayana 37, we were really excited about the KISS wind generator mounted on the stern. Friends of ours have the same generator and had been singing its praises. While the KISS isn’t enough alone to power the boat’s electrical systems, it can provide enough on a windy, cloudy day or a windy night to continuously run the refrigeration.
Or so we were told…
We have yet to find out if it’s true.
Of course, like many of the electronics onboard, the KISS was not functioning when we purchased the boat. We have deinstalled the generator and are in the troubleshooting and rebuilding phase (currently in limbo due to parts needed) —more on that in another post.
Solar
From our experience living on a boat for over 6 years, we know how important solar power is on a cruising sailboat. After our Atlantic crossing on our catamaran, we increased our solar panels after having to turn off the refrigerator on day 8 (out of 22 days) on our crossing. When you are only bringing in so much power, you have to start prioritizing what you can do without. When on a passage, we always prioritize our navigation lights, instruments, and autopilot.
When we purchased our Tayana 37 she was what we call a “Dock Queen”. While she had cruised many miles from the USA, Eastern and Western Caribbean, she was mostly set up to be tied up to a marina dock, plugged into the grid. Meaning, there were no solar panels.
One of the first things we did after purchasing her was to add four 180 watt solar panels, totaling 720 watts of solar. The panels are mounted on the aft side rails with a design that allows us to tilt them towards the direction of the sun or lower them completely.
The power that is generated by the panels is controlled by a Victron Solar Charger MPPT 150/60-TR. We like the fact that we can monitor the charger on a mobile device by connecting to the charger through blue tooth. It works great!
Portable Generator
If you recall from our electronics post, we love having a lot of backups on a boat. What happens if there are several cloudy days and we are in desperate need of power? We pull out our trusty Honda EU2000i, crank her up and plug her into Soltara to charge up the batteries!
We also use the generator when working on projects at anchor that require power tools. While some people may have to spend money to go into a marina to plug into the grid to complete some projects, we can stay at anchor and use our little generator as long as we have a little gasoline.
Power Storage
Battery Bank
The battery bank that was in place when we bought the boat was a set of four T105 Trojan Lead Acid batteries. They were on their way out, and not holding much charge. We experienced good luck with the Victron AGM’s on our catamaran for 6 years, so we decided to upgrade the battery bank to Victron AGM’s on Soltara.
We now have a total of 660 Amp hours, not including the starter battery. We also like the fact that we do not have to worry with monitoring battery water as we did with Lead Acid batteries.
We monitor our battery bank with a Victron 712 battery monitor that is also easy to view on a mobile device using Bluetooth.
Along with the new batteries, we installed a Victron 60 amp hour battery charger to use when plugged into shore power or on those cloudy days when we use our Honda EU2000i portable generator to pump some juice into the batteries.
Future technical posts
As I continue to delve deeper into the technical systems onboard, I will go into the following in future technical posts:
110 Volt AC systems
The possibility of adding a Radar system
The possibility of adding a Wind Vane
Thanks for reading and I look forward to your comments.
L. J.
Adventures of SV Soltara 
6 replies on “Power Generation on Our Sailboat”
Hi Guys, Good article. You have a good amount of solar power onboard. I like the Honda for backup. Nice Package.
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Hey Martin! Thanks for the comment. We love our solar power, that’s for sure! And that little Honda has more than paid for itself! Hope you and Tracy had a good Christmas and we wish you a happy New Year!
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Enjoyed reading your article! How did you figure the battery and solar capacity? Did you consider how much power is being consumed with respect to limiting any of it? Perhaps to reduce the need for fewer batteries and sources of power? Always love to hear these upgrade stories!
OTOH, Did you make it to Culebra?
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Hi Chris & Kelly. Thanks for your question. Before we made the solar and battery upgrade, we did a combination of calculating our usage and looking back at our experiences on our previous boat. For now, we far exceed what we need. However, we do anticipate the possibility of additional upgrades and we took some valuable lessons from our previous ocean crossing on our previous boat. When we crossed the Atlantic, we were turning off the fridge each night to conserve power, until day 8. That was when we had to make the painful decision to turn off the fridge in order to have enough power to run our autopilot and nav lights and instruments. The problem was the fact that the sails were shading the panels and we also had quite a few cloudy days on the passage. We then decided that as much solar we could carry in the future, we would do so. We had a watermaker on our previous boat, and there is a possibility we will add one at some point on this boat if budget allows. So far, we are usually at 100% early morning each day, and 100% by noon on a cloudy day, with lots of power coming in to charge all of our devices each day and sometimes operate electrical tools from our inverter to save on gasoline for the generator.
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Hi guys,
Thanks for following my blog. Not much going on at the moment. I’m wintering in Plymouth but plan to set off again in May and make my way to the Cape Verde Islands for an Atlantic crossing in November.
I like your solar installation but not sure how you shoehorned four big panels onto Solatra! I currently have two 120W panels hanging off the guard wire either side of the cockpit but plan on building an arch over the next couple of months and should be able to get four panels on there so I’ll have 480W. I don’t have a water maker and use wind self steering (I do have an electric autopilot as backup) so my power needs are actually quite modest currently.
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Likewise, thanks for following! We both chuckled when we read your comment, “not sure how you shoehorned four big panels onto Soltara!” It wasn’t easy and we expect to have to make some changes to the setup.
We extended the stainless pushpit so we have stainless lifelines that reach to where our boarding gates are located. We have 2 panels mounted on each side, with Sea Dog clamps and extending stainless arms (old stanchions that we repurposed after extending the pushpit) that adjust and raise and lower the panels. The set up works really well at anchor and on the short test sails we have been on so far, but we will really test out the system on our next sail which will be a 4-5 day passage. We expect we will be lowering and securing 1-2 panels on that voyage.
What we expect to happen, is that we will eventually add a stainless arch and move 2 of the 4 panels there. We have some ideas of how we we will alter the setup, but it is all still in the brainstorming mode.
When we make our next passage, we will be paying close attention to how the current setup works and we will write a post to share that info.
We plan to add self-steering in the near future, and possibly a watermaker at some point but the jury is still out on that one. While the watermaker was nice on the catamaran, we look at it as a “nice to have” and not a “must have”. We have also discussed a radar, if we decide to indeed sail back across the Atlantic and sail in the North Sea and Baltic. But plans are always changing, so time will tell.
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