More Power To Us

Our 5 month trip to New Caledonia and Vanuatu highlighted that it would be a good thing to upgrade our power generation capacity. Existing capacity of a maximum of 9 amps during a sunny day committed us to running our generator for longer and more frequently than we wanted. Our solar panels would only keep up with refrigeration in daylight hours. Throw in navigation equipment or even lights and entertainment and the battery bank figures rapidly headed south. In anticipation of a solar power upgrade in the offing, the Bloke started ordering parts as soon as we'd arrived in Bundaberg from Vanuatu. The kids in Brisbane knew for sure we not long away from visiting them once parts for the project began arriving.

 

The new controller

A new 40amp controller from the 12Volt Shop was conveniently the 'Big Brother' of our existing controller and was selected because it had the same footprint as our existing one. It could also feed to our Orora digital display. That would circumvent a lot of messing about. The Bloke chose conventional rigid panels (2 x 200W) ones over flexible ones and knowing that the old ones would be impossible to remove from the Signex panel on top of our targa, he decided to simply mount the new ones over the top of the old.

Targa with signex panel

Doing all the work whist still in a marina was beneficial due to access to a chandlery for all the fixing bolts, lengths of wire and incidentals. What had the Bloke stumped though was how exactly he'd be able to lift the panels into place and do the fixing. We were secured in our pen bow first and his work area was above the transom and over water! He couldn't see a solution at first but once I'd suggested undoing the back section of the bimini, a brilliant slot opened up.

Clear air and space to work

The panels have been in operation for well over 1 month now and we declare them as a win. We are going longer between big charge days having more than doubled capacity from 9 to about 25 amps. While we aren’t getting 25 amp often (blame the rainy weather) we seem to manage 9 amps even when it’s overcast. Definitely winning!