Our major concern when anchoring out is not having enough power to get through the day. When we bought the boat in '09 she had a house bank of four 100a/hr Lifeline AGM's located under the starboard settee in the main salon. The only way to keep them charged was to run the engine (110 amp Balmar alternator) for 4 hours each morning. We have two 85 watt solar panels and a 400 watt wind generator but they don't even come close to doing the job. Our biggest problem is that the refrigerator and freezer each have their own compressors and the freezer is so poorly insulated that it runs continuously.
This winter (January 2013) we're addressing several of these problems and hope to have the thing tackled in the end. We're replacing the countertop in the galley and will re-insulate the fridge/freezer at that time. We're installing a genset so we won't have to run the engine to charge the batteries and we'll also be increasing our solar capacity to 450 watts.
We just completed the installation of new batteries for both the engine and the house bank. The original four batteries in the house bank were Lifeline AGM model GPL-27T, rated at 100 a/hr each. We replaced them with six Lifeline AGM model GPL-31XT rated at 125 a/hr. These are very close to the same size and by making better use of the available space we were able to fit them all in the same compartment and still have room for ventilation. Our house bank went from 400 a/hrs to 750 a/hrs. That should be enough to keep us out of the 50% discharge range.
We also installed a Magnum Energy Pure Sine 2800 watt inverter / 125 amp charger. When combined with the 50 amp Charles charger that came with the boat we'll have 175 amps available for bulk charging which is just right for the size of house bank we now have. With the inverter we also installed an ME-RC remote control panel and an ME-BMK battery monitor, both from Magnum.
