![]() Sure we can look up the specification, but that doesn't help much unless we can also make an accurate assessment of how much of the time the machine in question will be running, and how its consumption may vary over time not always, or even often, easy. It's difficult to estimate electrical usage for a given piece of kit.It pushes us into thinking about the details ahead of the big picture-pretty much always a bad idea.Typically, when designing an electrical system, we are supposed to fill out a form listing every single load on the boat in order to calculate our expected consumption.īut there are several problems with that approach: Whatever your situation, do make the effort to go through this process, particularly if you have not yet got out there cruising and/or done a multi-day passage, since unrealistic assumptions about power usage, leading to undersize battery banks and charging sources, is one of the most common cruise and/or voyage ruiners.Īnd even for me, after all my years of cruising successfully on the same boat, this exercise has proved both interesting and useful. That's what I'm going to cover in this chapter, and then in the next we will move on to battery bank specification. which charging sources we will need: generator, solar, main engine, wind, etc.īut the first thing we need to do, before getting into all that fun stuff, is think about electrical consumption and how to keep it reasonable.Two core decisions we must make when designing a cruising boat's electrical system for living aboard full-time and making offshore voyages are:
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