Electrical Systems Upgrade

For the techo's out there...

Cruising in Greece is different to what we have experienced so far where we tended to go on to a marina about once a week and plug into shore power, top up the water and get some provisions. We paid for the privilege, sometimes exhorbitantly. Since being in Greece we have not been on a marina except for the first 2 days while we cleared customs. We have either anchored out in a bay or tied up to a town wall. This does not come with plug in shore power at this time of the year, so our sole way of charging the batteries has been via running the engine. But for how long? We did not know as had no idea when we were fully charged. It was all a guessing game.

Further to our previous blog on the subject of battery issues on board Matelot, we make a decision to invest in two items of “kit” –

• A Stirling Battery to Alternator Charger
• A Stirling Power Management System with Amp Hour Counter

What do they do?

The Battery to Alternator Charger increases the charge to the battery so that instead of having to run the engine for 2 hours to fully charge, it now takes around 40 minutes. The batteries consequently stay topped up all the time and are much ‘healthier’ as a result. There is a lot of technical stuff around just how it does this which we won't go into right now.

The Power Management System tells us –

- What speed the batteries are charging at
- What level the batteries are charged to
- How many amp hours we are using at any given time
- How many amp hours we have remaining…
- We can find out how many amp hours any item on the boat uses, ie the fridge runs all the time and uses around 2.9 amp hours, while the anchor light uses up over 3 amps per hour.
- We can run the saloon lights at night in confidence that we have enough battery to do so - we can curl up and read a book!
- We know exactly when we have to charge again

The drama it took to get there…

We have been on the town wall in Levkas for a week now. We have achieved a massive amount of work on the boat and are delighted. The engine service is completed on Thursday afternoon (9 October) and the electrician arrives to start the installation of our new equipment. He does not speak any English so we cannot talk to him at all. We start to get a little nervous when 2 people are still on our boat at 2pm on Friday but at least one of them speaks a little English. By 3pm they announce the job is done! Richard takes a look and his face says it all. A couple of questions and the work starts again. By 5pm they are sure they have finished and demonstrate the read outs on channel 1 (house), channel 2 (starter)… etc. Off they go and we look forward to talking it over with English speaking Pip the next morning. He is coming to install a bridging switch between house and starter batteries which we have discovered in the process is non existent.

Saturday morning and Pip arrives. Richard has lots of questions, as the readout we are getting does not equate to what the manual says we should have from this equipment. It soon transpires that we have no wiring connected to the house battery, so maybe that was supposed to be a wireless link – very modern? Quite a few hours – in fact, most of Saturday later and we really truly are finished. The panel on the wall does give us the information we want and the batteries are charging properly. Thank you Pip!

The only thing we need to do now is pay the account and get out of here. The weather has been golden sunny and warm throughout the past week and our fingers are crossed that this will continue.