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solar panels on boats and controllers and we our guest speaker is nigel as you can tell from my smile it's hundred percent genuine and always a pleasure nigel thanks for joining us here today hey thank you jeff awesome we actually have a lot to talk about yeah we do there's been a raft of new technologies coming into the solar world in the last few years and some of them as recently as last year which have basically um changed many of the prescriptions we've used for for recommending panels on solar panels on boats so it's a really good time to be talking somewhere okay everyone so we're going to dive into solar um for all of you out there um i want to reemphasize how solar is a real tangible way for us to recharge your battery banks uh from the sun it's not only is it a good maybe environmental decision for some of us certainly um but besides just the environmental reasons of doing that um and not having to run a generator or recharge your batteries both power boaters and sailboats and here in the pacific northwest having done thousands of solar arrays i'd say it's about 50 50 sailboats and powerboats so this applies to all of us and i'm talking 20-foot boats i've done a solar array largest solar array we've probably done was on a 70-foot boat 50-foot boats all the time power boats 55 60 feet 30 feet 28 feet it doesn't matter there is a benefit to solar to pretty much every power boulder or sailboard that doesn't have a generator running 24 7. you know some power boarders eventually have to run the generator forever well though power requirements are people knows running generators is a big benefit to solar oh there is um and certainly for all of us um solar is something we have many of us as voters have and they're kind of let's just say an area that is basically unused that is just facing the sun it could be uh your bimini could be a dodger it could be a hard divinity it could be a hard top on a powerbook it could even be a portion of the deck that you really don't go that often brow you know we've done it on browse and so there's a lot of different ways of getting uh solars on your boat we'll talk about ridgid we'll talk about flexible we'll get in all of that but first let's find the justification for doing so and so with that nigel i'm gonna give it to you because i've seen your presentation on that by the way and i have to say you're such i love it you really did the analysis so give it to us tell us about uh why should voters consider solar on their boats well i i got you know 12 15 years ago now a large grant from the european union with a couple of other guys to look at the energy efficiency on boats so we we collected a lot of real data and on uh how much it actually costs to generate electricity on boats when we're running an engine battery charging an anchor or running a generator to power a battery charger and i have just gigabytes of data and the first time i processed all of this and i looked at the numbers and i came up with a cost per kilowatt hour of generating energy on the boat i thought i had the decimal place in the wrong place so i did it again and came up with the same number and i did it again and came up with the same number finally i realized the decimal place was in the right place wow it's almost impossible to generate electricity on a boat using a fossil-fueled engine at less than uh two or three dollars a kilowatt hour and you know we're paying 10 to 20 cents at home per kilowatt hour and uh in fact most people when they're generating electricity on a boat it's costing them between five and ten dollars a kilowatt hour and when we're at the end of the charge cycle when we're charging our lead acid batteries battery charging at anchor we're spending about 20 dollars a kilowatt hour for the last little bit of energy we're putting in the batteries i mean these numbers are pretty shocking as i say the first time i had the decimal place i put point in the wrong place and um and i've done these calculations uh dozens of times and with different test data and so on and it always comes out the same and the the core costs here which we don't think about is actually the amortization cost of the engine because you know most of our uh propulsion engines for example they're rated for five thousand hours in a boat well you spend twenty thousand dollars putting that engine in the boat and it's got 5000 hours of life in it it costs you four dollars an hour to run it regardless of whether it's doing any useful work so then when you're at the tail end of the battery charge cycle when you're putting a few amps into the batteries to stop them from self-hating uh you're pointing out maybe a few hundred watts it's still costing you four dollars an hour plus the fuel plus the maintenance yeah when you factor that in you discover that your kilowatt hour cost is going up to ten and fifteen and twenty dollars a kilowatt hour so when you put solar in that light and you look at a like a hundred watt solar panel um it's going to put out about 300 watt hours a day on a so that's a third of a kilowatt hour um you multiply that by 300 days in the year and then you think about you'd be spending ten dollars a kilowatt hour to generate that electricity using an engine all of a sudden the solar looks to be a really good investment yeah so for any boat that gets used a fair bit obviously if you only use the boat for two weekends a year and you put two thousand dollars worth of solar on it you're never ever gonna to get any kind of payback out of it but if you use your boat for a month or two of the year or even live aboard and then you compare the cost of the solar to the cost of generating that electricity by running an engine a generator or the main engine then the solar starts to look really good and on top of that of course you've got less engine run time you don't have to put up the noise in the exhaust where you typically speaking you keep your batteries in a higher average state of charge which substantially extends the battery life so that's another hidden benefit from the solar yeah it all pencils out in a way to where i i recommend nowadays anybody that's going to take the boat offshore for for even a week or two a year put as much solar on the boat as they can find space 100 agree 100 agree um and and you bring a good point i mean not only is it obviously less expensive than running a generator recharge of batteries but the other thing too is there's a certain i mean also the great thing about solar is all the costs are up front you know there's no maintenance cost on a solar rate you know when i did my solar array it's nine years now you know nine years ago and all the costs were upfront and they're substantial if you're doing a big array and if you're choosing you know better quality panels and you're doing it the right way and you're not cutting corners and it can add up it can certainly add up but the flip side is it's all front loaded you know that those costs are gone once you've done all that then every day that you're out there and then you get not only the lower cost of energy production but the other thing too you're right is to me it's also even redundancy you know it's it's an alternative way like what i mean people do lose alternators not literally losing an alternator but the the alternator alternators have a tough life it's really hard being an alternator it's probably the one of the hardest things to be on about you know working in a warm environment super hot they're asked to do these crazy things running at maximum output for long periods of time to recharge your battery banks and eventually they do fail and the good news with solar is now you've got a redundant way of recharging your batteries it might not be everything you want but it's at least not zero that's another thing too i like about solar it gives redundancy and even redundancy when you're at shore power you know you might lose your power for a couple days through three days now your solar ray can you know keep up pick up the slack here in british columbia i don't know what it's like you guys out in on the eastern seaboard but here when you go to marina and you're staying for overnight they're gonna actually ask you if you're taking power from the dock they're gonna charge you more you know some slips include power but some slips it's optional and you'll pay an extra five or ten dollars for power that night you know in the summer i have to say one of the greatest players i have is when i'm cruising from may to september and they asked me that question would you like power with your slip overnight i'm like you know all good i don't even take out the cord you know i don't need to solar just literally is taking care of all my needs in the summer because the sun's shining enough and i'm literally i'm not counting how much money i'm saving every time i go to the dock but i certainly don't need to plug in i just don't i mean i'll plug in sometimes if i need to but sometimes if i'm there just for a night or two i'm like yeah no i'm good i'm not i'm in the full state of charging my batteries and solar can do that so that's another benefit of having a solar right yeah um but every time you don't plug in you're uh eliminating the risk of galvanic corrosion on the shore power cord so we're we actually yeah even though you know we have a galvanic isolator and all that stuff um i still plug in as little as i can and i'll plug in so rapidly charge the batteries and then i'll unplug again yeah i i i never leave our boat plugged in to shore power on an extended basis yeah is it sometimes it's it's not your boat it's a neighbor's building yeah you know that happens a lot we we get called you know sometimes there's a whole section on the dock there may be three four or five votes and the owner it's not a bad owner sometimes it's just an order it's an accident they didn't know something you know something happened that's unintentional it's not always the derelicts you know some boats of course unfortunately are abandoned or near abandoned and those votes are some of them obviously questionable and you know the electrical is maybe something to be worried but sometimes it's it's a boat that you wouldn't even think you know you're thinking oh that won't give me grief um but errors do happen on those and you're right um also if you found this video interesting please subscribe it honestly does it does help us to know that all this time that we're investing is actually we're reaching a lot of voters and i want to thank all of you for watching thanks for spending some time with me Videolytics    Tools