Oceanvolt Hybrid Motor

[a64pilot]

There are going to be some bugs with anything new, electric has noting to do with that.
What’s important is how the manufacturer handles the bugs when they occur.
Seems Yanmar for example has some bugs with their Saildrives, ref cone clutches for example.

[rabbi]

Originally Posted by a64pilot

There are going to be some bugs with anything new, electric has noting to do with that.
What’s important is how the manufacturer handles the bugs when they occur.
Seems Yanmar for example has some bugs with their Saildrives, ref cone clutches for example.

Fully agree, however the failure rate of a new technology needs to be at an acceptable level before i would commit to it. To me the Jajapami one is so far mixed affair at best.

I haven't seen many experience reports yet, but i admit i haven't looked actively.

[BigBeakie]

Originally Posted by rabbi

Fully agree, however the failure rate of a new technology needs to be at an acceptable level before i would commit to it. To me the Jajapami one is so far mixed affair at best.

I haven't seen many experience reports yet, but i admit i haven't looked actively.

So what is the failure rate, then? How many other problems have you heard about? What is the the warranty claim rate vs installed base?

[transmitterdan]

If OV wants to tout their reliability #’s they can publish them. Why are you asking people with incomplete data? Get it from the source.

[rabbi]

Originally Posted by BigBeakie

So what is the failure rate, then? How many other problems have you heard about? What is the the warranty claim rate vs installed base?

I don't have any data, as a consumer i can only judge by the reports i find on the internet.
All i am saying is that two failures in a cat within weeks does not give me much confidence. Certainly not enough to drop 30k into this, which is our fuel bill for the next 80 years or so.

If my neighbours BMW needs a new gear box after a grew weeks, and then a new engine must weeks later this certainly is not a testament of their quality.

I'm not against EP, far from. Given our low fuel consumption i think it could work for our cruising habits, too. And I'd love to move quietly under engine.

But EP need to be roughly as troublefree as the ice they are to replace. No point otherwise to go for EP given the cost & risk involved.

Maybe you can point me to reports of trouble free installations? I'd love to read and learn. Seriously.

[JaJapami]

Originally Posted by BigBeakie

It's very refreshing to have an experienced OV user here on CF., at long last. Welcome! 👍Thanks for your comments regarding your experience with Electrical Propulsion and Oceanvolt.

A warning to you though that some here will think you are crazy for using EP, because it just "doesn't have enough power". Your experience seems to indicate otherwise, since your SD15's (22 HP) at half power had very similar propulsive thrust as the Lavezzi ( a smaller, lighter boat) with twice the HP and at full power!

I have been trying to make that case for quite some time on this forum, if you look at previous posts, so it is good to have some more data like that. What headwind would you say you could motor into now with the SD15's at full power?

We are building a 50 foot performance cat with OV Sd15 Servoprops, a 16kW DC genset, 24kW Valence LFP bank, and 4.5kW of solar. I was pleased to read your blog about OV coming to repair the saildrive, because I think their 5 year worldwide warranty and monitoring service is nice peace of mind.

Enjoy your silence😉


Sent from my iPad using Cruisers Sailing Forum

Hi to all contributing to the discussion on our topic here! Sorry for a late reply but we had to travel from Panama to Germany due to some urgent family reasons. That is why I was not able to contribute here with more information. Sorry to had to read about some speculating about our fixes to the system.
Here is a short overview of what happened:
We sailed on the Biskay when the starboard sail drive was broken by strong seas. The reason was that we experimented together with OV on the prop size. The prop installed was a 18”x12” while port is 18x10 (it is still working great). Standard size is 16.5”. We wanted to try the larger ones to optimize regeneration when sailing in slower and faster conditions. With unfavorable SW winds and just the port engine working 100% we had to move slowly towards Portimao on the south side of Portugal. That is to our knowledge the only place with a Travellift wide enough for 8m beam on the Atlantic coast of Spain and Portugal. When the sail drive had beeen replaced by a new unit the tests made obvious that the motor bearing was damaged as well and needed to be replaced.
We then decided to continue to Gibraltar and later the Canaries because the problem with the bearing was no severe problem for those distances. The starboard was fitted with the regular Propeller to reduce the forces until Gori came up with a new design.
In San Miguel Tenerife Marina we found Great support by Jose Antonio managing the Marina. They arranged for the second necessary lift out to replace the motor and to fit the newly designed prop. Since then we haven’t had any more problems on the saildrives and motors. This lift out is now 7000nm agodone and we can use the motors at cruising speed continuously. After cleaning the growth on the hulls which had grown big over time we now reach 6.8-7.1 knots in calmer water.
All we need now is an extra cooling pump to cool down the generator after operating several hours because it will switch off from full load to zero resulting in high temperatures in the insulation box. After that there is no more to do then to use the engines as we like.
I would highly recommend to install a bigger DC 48V genset than 16kW. We have a Fischer Panda AGT-23000 installed that will deliver 21kW. That gives us the possibility to cruise continuously with 10-11 kW on each motor.
Hope I can be a bit more responsive from now on. We are going back end of August to Panama.
Cheers
Jan-Dirk / JaJapami

[transmitterdan]

JaJapami,

Thanks for the report and we all hope your troubles are over.

Your cruising speed and power consumption numbers sound reasonable. Definitely a cruising boat needs to be outfitted to motor as long as the fuel will last. Hope you get to that point soon.

There is no free lunch as we all know. Those special “magic” regeneration props come with a down side. Rough seas are a real threat to massive appendages. It requires robust bearings and strong attachment points for them. Hopefully they get that right.

So when motoring dead into a 40 knot wind and 1-2M seas what speed can you make continuously with generator(s)?

[JaJapami]

Thank you so much, Transmitterdan, for your kind wishes. Life has its downsides especially as probably all of us have experienced with aging parents. We hope that we enjoyed my father with our visits and that we have been of some help in his situation. But we also need to take care of our boat so time has come to return to JaJapami.

We are very happy about the interest here in this forum with EP. it was our deliberate decision to help to improve the existing system to be capable for a blue water cruising boat to use this technology. And we think that together with Oceanvolt we did a great job to get things practicable for such a requirement.

So far we did not experience 40 kts of headwind that we had to motor into. The most demanding was the trip around the Diamond Rock into Le Marin on Martinique which was between 28-32 knots sustained wind directly on the nose. The swell was more like 1.5 to 3 meters against us. At that time we still had the hulls with lots of marine growth on it and the motor controllers were not actively cooled limiting the power to 7 kW starboard (the generator is there producing more warm air) and 8.5 kW on the port engine. With that we achieved SOG of 3.0-3.3 knots. Our friends as I commented before with their Lavezzi Diesel engines did about the same speed.

It is often forgotten that the torque lines of EP and diesel motors are very different. We have a flat torque with the OV motors, which IMO gives us a better performance in oncoming seas as the engines provide the same torque even if the boat is slowed down by oncoming seas. The top speed on the other hand is lower than with the diesels as you probably know, because the maximum rpm we can produce is around 2050-2100 rpm.

With a clean hull and the possibility now to power the engines at 10/11 kW we should do a little better. I hope it will take some time until the next time we need to motor into the wind, but I will let you know when we have gained more data points on that.

[yvest]

@Jajapami,

Thanks a lot for the updates!.
When you provide kW numbers, these are measured right out of the battery ?

Regarding the generator power, this always goes through the batteries (never directly to the engine controller), right ?
And do you have an idea regarding the overall efficiency ? (compared to say, same diesel consumption on one diesel engine)

Also have you thought about the "servoprops" from Oceanvolt ? Or they were not out yet ?
(on these getting feed back from the ita catamarans just being launched would be great).

[JaJapami]

@yvest
The realtime power consumption is measured by the system and displayed in the motor control panels in Watts/kW including rpm. I will try to provide a sample picture of these displays. The general idea is that you set the rpm with the throttle controllers for each motor and the motor controllers will draw as much power as needed to reach the rpm at the propeller. That means the you have different power consumption according to the conditions you are motoring in.

The generator can provide its power directly to the motors and does not need the battery bank to be online. But of course we must ensure that we consume all the power from the Genset (21 kW) when the battery management should be offline. We have done this once when we had to motor into a Le Marin boatyard to figure out what the problem was with a battery that had a bad cell (probably a manufacturing fault as OV said that they had a few more failed cells form the same lot). It worked fine and we did not need the tow help provided just in case it would not work to run the motors directly of the generator.

Overall efficiency is hard to measure. We personally never run the boat on just one engine as we believe that it is resulting in a lot of stress on the one engine running. But this is up to everyone to decide.

The generator consumes somewhere around 5 litres per hours. I don't have the numbers for the 55 hp Volvos that would be standard on the Saba 50, neither on the 75 hp optional upgrade engines. We are happy with the consumption and enjoy the quite times when motoring for the usual distances and times.

Concerning the Servoprops they were not ready when our boat was fitted out. To change our propellers has never been discussed between OV and us. I think it is a great development but it also comes with extra costs. I personally have more trust in the Gori folding props just as a gut feeling as there is more mechanics in the Servoprops that may become a mechanical problem with time. But please this is just my simple thought and I never looked into a change to Servoprops as I said. I am curious to get information from owners of those Servoprops!

[BigBeakie]

Thanks JaJapami for your sharing the information about your installation. Sorry I haven't responded until now, has been busy times.

The rationale for us choosing the 16kW DC genset as opposed to a bigger one was that we considered the additional thrust of the Servoprops as balancing the power given by a bigger genset, and decided that we were happy accepting that we would not be able to motor at full revs for indefinite period, because the thrust figures showed we would not gain much by going to bigger genset. That was with the water-cooled Servoprops & controllers, it may have been different if we'd gone with the SD15 & Gori or Flexofolds.

We did a wind force analysis for our boat, and the difference between full power to each motor vs half power was surprisingly little. Our 16kW milspec DC Genset does deliver full output even under extended running max temps, so that also was a factor. If it dropped below half power, we may have decided otherwise. At 1800 revs it's normal charging RPM, it uses 2 L/hr.

We also believe there are good alternative options in almost all cases, to bashing into head seas at full throttle.
That full power scenario certainly will be necessary for relatively short periods, that the battery capacity can handle with Genset running, so we'll see how that goes.

I spoke to a very experienced multihull cruiser who has done tens of thousands of sea miles( 90 thousand in 12 years to be exact), and in low latitudes ( two Horns, one of them solo in storm)as well as the nice stuff in the tropics, and his assesment was (paraphrased long discussion) " ...if you're relying on your engine to get you out of serious trouble, you have under prepared. You can always use other strategies. Like, park the boat and wait. Fixed schedules and destinations are trouble, sooner or later."

This assumes, of course, that the boat is set up well for heavy weather sailing.....I guess many are not.

Fair winds.

[transmitterdan]

A motor that cannot drive a sailing vessel in bad weather is only a little more useful than a paper weight. If by design one can only depend on it for short periods during good weather then that is a decision that many would find troubling.

Cruising boats never depend on one thing. They layer up systems for maximum safety. Auxiliary propulsion that is capable to run continuously is an important safety feature to the vast majority of cruisers.

[Paul Elliott]

Originally Posted by transmitterdan

A motor that cannot drive a sailing vessel in bad weather is only a little more useful than a paper weight. If by design one can only depend on it for short periods during good weather then that is a decision that many would find troubling.

Cruising boats never depend on one thing. They layer up systems for maximum safety. Auxiliary propulsion that is capable to run continuously is an important safety feature to the vast majority of cruisers.

But this hasn't always been the case, or the expectation, and I'm not just talking about the old wooden ship days. Yes, "the vast majority of cruisers" do expect this performance from their propulsion, but it wasn't that long ago that a cruiser's "auxiliary engine" was pretty much only good for getting in and out of port, and cruisers had tiny fuel tanks. They did OK back then.

Me, I like my big engine and tanks, my radar, GPS, AIS, SSB, and satphone. But others can rationally choose otherwise.

[valhalla360]

Originally Posted by Paul Elliott

but it wasn't that long ago that a cruiser's "auxiliary engine" was pretty much only good for getting in and out of port, and cruisers had tiny fuel tanks.

Define "long ago".

The idea that a boat should be able to maintain hull speed in moderate conditions and produce that power (all-be-it at slower resultant speeds under adverse conditions) for may hours...is not a new idea or new in practice. This is a pretty common application going back 50-70yrs and before that is wasn't because they didn't want the capability...it was just not practical to provide it back in the 50's.

It's fun to read stories about the Pardeys sailing without a motor but they were never the mainstream cruiser (or maybe more correctly, there were far fewer cruisers because most were not wiling to accept that style of cruising and the risks that come with it)

[Paul Elliott]

Originally Posted by valhalla360

Define "long ago".

The idea that a boat should be able to maintain hull speed in moderate conditions and produce that power (all-be-it at slower resultant speeds under adverse conditions) for may hours...is not a new idea or new in practice. This is a pretty common application going back 50-70yrs and before that is wasn't because they didn't want the capability...it was just not practical to provide it back in the 50's.

It's fun to read stories about the Pardeys sailing without a motor but they were never the mainstream cruiser (or maybe more correctly, there were far fewer cruisers because most were not wiling to accept that style of cruising and the risks that come with it)

For me, "long ago" is before I was born, mid-1950's. The small, unreliable, engines on some cruising sailboats were called "auxiliaries" for a reason.

Of course the Pardeys weren't "mainstream" sailors. Neither are the folks who choose to install what I would consider to be underpowered electric propulsion. But they are still sailors, and this is the choice they have made. I do hope that they will be happy with that choice. As a "mainstream" sailor myself, I would not choose to own a large boat with an underpowered electric propulsion system. But others might.