Upgrades

Upgrades

Feels like we are on an up-slope. Last we updated here, we were struggling with a seemingly endless projects that were either not started or partially complete Including this post it seems, as I wrote this back in July). Unfortunately, that’s boat life. We knew that before we started, but it is tough to really deal with while it is happening, an even harder to talk about it. But it seems that were coming out of it finally.

Recently we were able to take Nymeria out for sailing again. Her new sails and new rigging are all working perfectly looking clean and new. Hearing the wind and waves flow by really reminded us of why we were doing this in the first place and began to pull us out of the funk we had both  been in over the winter. We were starting to talk about adventure plan again, and looking forward to days on the water, and places to sail. On big change was instead of thinking of the money we needed to spend fixing things, we began to think of the things that we wanted to upgrade to make sailing life better. We had already finished the rigging upgrade, and the “comfort” upgrade of the Dodger and Bimini sun covers. Now was the time to start getting into the big stuff.

The electrical system

The existing electrical system on board Nymeria was adequate, I guess, for what it was. We had two 100 Ah (Amp Hour) lead acid batteries that, as far as we could tell, still held a charge fairly well. We had a third battery for a starting battery, but the existing wiring with the charging system really wasn’t setup to separate them correctly so we ended up just always having one big three battery house bank. We had one 240 watt solar panel that charges the whole thing when we are not connected to shore power, and an old 20 amp battery charger for when we were. We also have  a 3.5 Kw generator, but we had never really been able to get it running consistently so we didn’t really count on that. This setup was good enough for our day sailing out on the bay and even a basic overnights at anchor, but we plan on a lot more time offshore, and more self-reliant.

Being the data junky that I am, I had done a ton of testing with that system. I spent several weeks just at our slip with the main charger turned off to see what the “base load” of the boat was and what the solar panel can do to keep up with that.  The main power user of the 12v system on the boat is the refrigerator. It pulls about 5 amps but cycles regularly, so overnight it sucks up about 30 Ah on its own overnight. The water pump pulls about 5 amps as well, but it is an on-demand use so overall isn’t much. Other than that, all the interior lights are LED now and barely consume anything. With all of that, (which isn’t much) Nymera could go about 3-5 days before having to turn the main AC charger back on.  Start to add in things like running lights, autopilot, radar, and other instruments while we our sailing and anchored, that can quickly start to shorten that time.

Might as well

One thing we needed that we didn’t have was an inverter, this would allow us to use our normal 110v AC system off the batteries. We need this in order to charge all our computers and other devices we use regularly. This was the first major thing we wanted to do for this electrical upgrade. We also needed to know what the whole electrical system looked like. The boat is 34 years old, and who knows how many “upgrades”, “fixes”, etc had been done by who knows who with who knows what skills.

Oh, and Shannon has REALLY wanted a USB port in the v-birth for her to charge her phone.

The plan was simple. We want an inverter, so what do we need to do that? In order to fully utilize the inverter we probably need more batteries. So that’s where we started. We called up Brent Hodges, the local marine electrician that basically everyone recommended to us and provided his with an initial list.

• New inverter
• More/better batteries
• USB port in v-birth
• General system overview/Make Safe

That first consult actually went fairly well, we had good ideas, and nothing seems too problematic to get done. So we planned out “Phase one” to get everything ready for an inverter, and “Phase Two” install the inverter and new USB ports. To get started, four new Firefly 116Ah batteries were purchased for 464Ah total. A lot of thought went into this decision, so I’ll try and cover that in its own post (coming soon), but this is more than double our existing capacity, and a much better battery. This was the beginning of a of a nearly endless cycle of “might as well”

Well, that’s a fire waiting to happen.

With a new battery installed, naturally comes a good rewire of all the high amperage cabling. It’s always good to make sure that runs are as short as possible for efficiency. Given we are adding a new inverter that can pull over 200Amps, we really want to make sure that the cables are all sized, fuzed, and run properly to safely handle that.  This process turned out to be a lot bigger than planned. Seems somewhere in the life of the Nymeria, batteries were moved/replaced or whatever, and we just had a ton of old high amperage cable run in weird locations and spliced every few feet. at one point in the install process Brent says “Well that’s a fire waiting to happen”. Turns out one of those wildly run high amperage cables was wrapped around the main fuel line for the engine, and had exposed copper from rubbing on something in the area. These are exactly the kind of things we want to fix before we set off.

Other than the pain that was re-running the big cables, the battery install went reasonably well. That was until we were closing things up. The last step of Phase One was to run all the new battery cables to the main panel for breakers and control. Well, as soon as Brent opened up the panel, all the lights dimmed and a slight sizzling was heard. The rats nest of years of “upgrades” behind the panel was going to need to be fixed. It was going to take several days to trace and test every wire so in yet another “might as well” moment, we decided to upgrade the panel as well.

Our two phase project just turned into three.

After several weeks of wire tracing and testing and pulling, the new Phase two was finally complete. This was a big step for Nymeria, most fires on boats are caused by bad electrical. Now that nearly every wire is accounted for, and has been rebuilt and reconnected at the panel with proper fuses and breakers we can rest a lot easier. We also replaced our old solar charger with a new Victron SmartSolar 100/50 MPPT charger in hopes that the better smarts would allow our old 240Watt solar panel to better keep up with our new power demands.

During that time, planning for Phase Three had been taking place. I tested the new solar charger, and while it was doing a much better job, it still wasn’t quite enough to fully charge what our nightly base load uses. Even though with the new batteries we have a lot more capacity, we still needed to rely on eventual generator or shore power to charge to 100%. We were able to get the generator running reliably so that wasn’t as much of a worry, I just really wanted the solar to be doing a lot more work. So Phase Three now includes a brand new 330Watt panel to replace the existing one.

We had done so much prep during Phases one and two that Phase three actually went very smoothly, We now have a 2000Watt Magnum energy Inverter/charger that can run our whole boat off the batteries without breaking a sweat. A solar panel that can recharge our overnight usage and then some every day, and FINALLY a USB port in the v-birth for Shannon.

So now, after over 2 months of “might as well” and our small inverter install turning into a complete electrical system overhaul I can now say that Nymeria is one giant step closer to being ready for wherever our next adventures take us.