On the boat you live by how much power you can make and how much you use. To make power you have wind generators, solar panels, and generators being the main options. The biggest draws of power are refrigeration, computers, and fans. If you have enough power then you add toasters, bread makers, hair dryers, hot water heaters, and other normally 110 volt household appliances that are luxuries on boats. In between the power users and the power makers are your batteries. Having a large battery bank for storage of power helps tie you between how often you make power and power use.
Our battery bank was made of lead acid batteries that had an amp hour of 660 but you only want to use 50% of that so in reality it was only 330 amp hours of use available. If we didn't generate any power we would use up 330 amp hours in 2, maybe 3 days. We knew we needed to generate more power so we changed our solar panels and that doubled the generation of 6 panels of 80 watts each to 6 panels of 175 watts. That would bring in about 300 amp hours a day. Then we made the decision to replace our batteries to the lithium iron phosphate type which took our house battery bank from 660 to 1680 amp hours of storage. The nice thing about lithium is you can use about 80% of it so in reality we have 1300 amp hours vs the old 330.
In the end we should have enough power to even make
Captain Kirk or in the case Captain Kris, happy.We had ordered the new batteries from China and then had to install the BMS, Battery Management System, on them.
boxes from China
2 cells per box
all unpacked and looking good
with the BMS installed
the new batteries all installed
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