Off Grid Power - Our System

The biggest Challenge when we moved from the marina was going to be POWER! That safety net of being plugged into shoreline grid energy, is one of the biggest advantages of being in a marina setting. Not only that but having your whole system fully charged all of the time can effectively hide any issues that may be lurking within your system.

Episode 3 of our new series about life on our new End of Garden Mooring, is about this struggle. And you’ll have to head over to our youtube channel, to see how we get on!

In this blog post we will list all of our new system from the batteries to the solar panels.

Batteries

So lets start with the batteries. We had been accumulating a pot of money to invest in some lithium batteries at some point in the future, but alas our need overtook our finances and we had to look at an alternative. Thankfully we had some good advice from Steve who had completed our boat safety, who recommended these batteries.

Rumoured to be used by Swan Boat Builders and with 2000 recharge cycles these are one of the best sealed lead acid batteries that you can buy. Coming in at a reasonable £239.99 each, we’ve got 3 giving us a total of 300Ah. As with all of the system we may add to it at a later date. Probably another 2 to the bank at some point.

In addition to the actual batteries we’ve also fitted a Victron Battery sense. This measures voltage at the battery bank terminals, therefore errors arising from voltage-loss due to cable resistance are avoided guaranteeing the correct charge-voltage. For lead batteries, battery temperature data is used to adjust the charge-voltages: cold batteries require an increased charge-voltage, whereas hot batteries require a decreased charge-voltage. So hopefully this will further extend the life of the batteries. This works well with the Victron Solar MTTP Controller

Solar

Again something we were building a budget for and that we knew would be a necessity once we left the marina to either continuous cruise or on a linear mooring was the addition of solar energy. And without doubt this new piece of kit is what I was most excited about attaching to our narrowboat and proven its worth within the first few hours of being hooked up to our battery system.

The panels themselves are from Bimble Solar. They are 330W JA All Black Solar Panels and we have fitted 2 giving us 660W. As with the batteries we will look at adding an additional panel at some point in the future. This biggest quandry with the panels was the fitting of them. We were debating whether to build boxes and have these as the lids which we have seen often on other narrowboats. We eventually gave up on this as we were very keen on making them fully adjustable so that we could tilt them to either port or starboard to maximise there efficiency, especially in the winter months. Our new mooring is SW facing so to be able to utilise low winter sun will be of great benefit. Essentially going with this system is future proofing us for that time in the future when we go continuous cruising.

The mounting system that we eventually found and fitted was from a company called Midsummer Energy, and their awesome tilting system that you can order from here. We had a slight delay as one of the fixtures sent was the wrong length and some of the rails were damaged in transit, but Midsummer were straight on to that and sent replacements out the same day.

As previously mentioned we went with the Victron MTTP Solar controller. Primarily for the bluetooth function so that we can monitor what is going on. The geek within is so happy with this. Before we got the battery sense fitted and the battery displays hooked up, everything was guess work and hope! Now we have the figures and numbers to dive into what is happening at any point in the day. One of the first readings from the system on a glorious sunny day gave us 1.68kw, and in real terms that powered Shell working from home all day and still managed to get the batteries to a ‘float’ state.

Gremlins survive

Three days ago our new ‘off grid’ party came to an abrupt end with a phone call from Shell at 7.45 that evening saying the power had gone on the narrowboat. It was a rainy day in the afternoon and we never reached either absorption or float status with the batteries. For some reason, Shell who was home alone working couldn’t log into the Victron App and therefore we had absolutely no knowledge of what was actually happening or the status of the charge in the batteries…. We had run the engine and thought that we would be ok for the rest of the day. We weren’t. And we will explain why in our next YouTube episode.

Although our gremlins endure we are on the precipice of living comfortably and easily off grid. We are so confident in fact we are already taking about installing wind and including a solar roof on the art studio plans. We have been pushed and stretched mentally and our knowledge of the boat electrics are 100% better than they were those few short weeks ago when we left the security of the marina, but we endure and are relishing the challenge…. Most of the time!

Stay Safe

Stay Afloat

Love Yourself

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