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100% Solar Electric Catamaran

My first boat was an old 73 with "outboard just needs a new coil and spark plug"
I gave up when the leaves in it were enough to collapse the axles on the trailer...

Second one was a nice bayliner the owner "pulled the carb and intake to upgrade, so easy fix"

Last straw was the houseboat i put MONTHS into ressurecting, when city made it have to go...

I like my kayak...
 
sak54895 said:
Now that there's no rigging to stiffen the boat do you see flexing between the hulls? I ask because when we stepped our mast on a fountaine pajot catamaran the salon windows on the bridge deck started squeaking.
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We haven't seen anything yet, other than our solar rack being less stiff than we had hoped. We're adding some cables and turnbuckles to tie it to the original mast step.
 
BentleyJ said:
Super nice, I miss boating. skiing & sailing.
Everyone knows the saying: The 2 best days in a boaters life are the day they buy and the day they sell. That was definitely not true for us, we used all our toys as often as possible. Money well spent as far as I'm concerned.
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That saying if for people that can’t fix things themselves and get bent over by mechanics that drain their wallets.
 
Sorry, I'll post more, I haven't been the best about documenting this.

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Close-up of the motor mount, 8" aluminum angle 1/2" thick holds it to the boat. Small jack plate to get it low enough.

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Shot of the ePropulsion control screen showing about 3400 watts at 5.5kn. The two silver pull switches are low voltage hooked up to an EV contactor. Allows us to turn the motors on and off without climbing down into a hatch, twice.

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I was working with the motor manufacturer on a problem I was having with the motor shutting off at full throttle. They wanted to see my setup. This is duplicated in the other sugar scoop.

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Early version of Raspberry Pi-based navionics system, OpenPlotter. RPI4 with SSD. AIS transceiver at the top right. Little tiny sub board coming off the RPI is accelerometer and magnetic compass. It's got a few other sensors as well.

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Shot of the guts of the system in progress. We had to sacrifice the port cabin to install all this stuff. The EG4 6500 (black box) has since been replaced with another EG4 MPPT Charger (white box) and a separate inverter.
 
Really nice! Thanks to share.
Do you ever find a plug at shore power with enough juice to plus your 2 chargeverter?
 
yabert said:
Really nice! Thanks to share.
Do you ever find a plug at shore power with enough juice to plus your 2 chargeverter?
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They'll work off 30 or 50 amp plugs, pretty common at most marinas. I doubt I could run both at full throttle off one 50 amp plug but they're adjustable. I haven't had to use them yet.
 
wpns said:
Nice! How does the steering work?
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Steering is a sore subject. It originally had regular cable push-pull type steering with a double helm. I removed the rudders and got new cables that would reach the motors. It was 6 turns lock to lock so it was pretty difficult to control. Lots of turning. I switched to hydraulic and it went from 6 turns to 3/4 turns (despite my and the vendor's calculations) and was impossible to control. I swapped out the pump for a variable displacement model and now we're at about 2 turns. It's ok but not great. I'm thinking about some sort of servo steering but what I have is ok for now. It's a skill to keep it on course, however.
 
lborkey said:
Steering is a sore subject. It originally had regular cable push-pull type steering with a double helm. I removed the rudders and got new cables that would reach the motors. It was 6 turns lock to lock so it was pretty difficult to control. Lots of turning. I switched to hydraulic and it went from 6 turns to 3/4 turns (despite my and the vendor's calculations) and was impossible to control. I swapped out the pump for a variable displacement model and now we're at about 2 turns. It's ok but not great. I'm thinking about some sort of servo steering but what I have is ok for now. It's a skill to keep it on course, however.
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Wow, 3/4 turn to locks... i bet that was fun!
2 is bad enough.
Unless you are trying for rodeo style in the harbor!
 
Very nice! I love the amount of solar...you just built the ultimate Great Loop boat.

Question: Were your speed vs wattage numbers done with the low pitch thrust prop or the other one?

We have a single Navy 6.0 on order but it will be the new redesign version that only fits a single sort of in between prop.

I fear that the old motor with the low pitch prop is more efficient than the new motor but I am not even sure if you can still get the older version now.
 
IGBT said:
Very nice! I love the amount of solar...you just built the ultimate Great Loop boat.

Question: Were your speed vs wattage numbers done with the low pitch thrust prop or the other one?

We have a single Navy 6.0 on order but it will be the new redesign version that only fits a single sort of in between prop.

I fear that the old motor with the low pitch prop is more efficient than the new motor but I am not even sure if you can still get the older version now.
Click to expand...
I'm using the low pitch props, which I believe are the ones for low speed, heavy craft. I did order the aluminum props as well as I've heard good things about them over the plastic ones but they're on backorder.
 
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