We have a Moody 376 in
Greece. We bought the
boat in November and spent the
winter in the marina
living aboard and refitting her to sail for the next season. On plugging her in to
shore power on the hard in preparation for splashing we discovered the
Victron charger was pooched, cooked all the house
batteries. So replaced the
charger with a Sterling charger and all the house bank (4x 100Ah wet cells). added 2x 150W
solar panels and an
MPPT charge controller. changed all incandescent lamps for LED's.
Once we set off sailing we found that after 3-4 days our fridge was turning off, we traced this back to a
battery protector which was shutting off the fridge as the
battery bank voltage fell below the pre set limit to prevent the bank being damaged by over discharging. This was despite the
solar panels dumping charge into the bank all day in the strong
med sun. We added a 5th 100Ah battery to the house bank, now sitting at 500Ah.
During me rewiring the main panel I blew the battery protector on the fridge circuit and replaced that with a new one.
So we have a 500Ah house bank serviced by 300W
solar on
MPPT charge controller for on the hook/cruising. We still are forced to run the
engine after 5-7 days or
head in to shore to top up on
shore power.
In terms of draw we only have 2 items that draw 24/7:
One Danfoss
refrigeration compressor running a standard evaporation plate and a second Waeco system with a holding plate. Both evaporator plate and holding plate are in the same insulated box.
The rest of the draw is intermittent and used sparingly:
all lamps are LED's
Autopilot ST4000
autohelm
B&G Zeus 9
chartplotter
Navman 7110
VHF
Furuno Navtex
AIS receiver
Windlass
200W pure sine wave
inverter (emergency
charging of
laptop only)
12v USB
charging for all tablets/phones/handheld
VHF etc
With 500Ah and 300W
solar we anticipated being able to be able to go for more than a week or so without having to run the
engine or hook up to shore
power. I see others on this forum doing more with less.
Is it a lack of solar? We had the
batteries load/stress tested as we had them down below 11.4v a couple of times and we were told they were fine.
Suggestions to improve/troubleshoot the system/make the vessel more self sustaining WRT
power?
Thanks in advance for suggestions/advice.