Solar and Electricals
30 January 2018 | St Anne Martinique
Frank
We arrived safely in St Anne a week ago.
It's been a pretty tough period with strong winds and rain and a lot of maintenance and feeling a bit poorly too. Blood sugar has been a bit higher than I would so I'm trying even harder to keep the diabetes well under control. The answer is a diet of water and cardboard only!
We have bought 4 50w replacement semi-flexible solar panels locally from a specialist shop called YES. We also bought some canvas material. Simon from Brisa is a much better seamstress than me and has offered to help fit them to the bimini when the weather improves.
We have just managed to get half our money back on the old panels.
I spent most of the past 3 days sorting out a series of frustrating electrical issues on Cranstackie a catamaran belonging to our good friends Alister and Ester.
The first problem was they had lost AC mains voltage to half the boat, we traced the problem to a badly corroded socket in the port heads.
The next issue avoided a near catastrophic disaster with their wind turbine. The incorrectly fitted fuse holder actually caught fire and and the feed from the voltage regulator also went to the wrong side of the main battery isolator switch.
There were a whole series of issues around the installation of their new Mastervolt charger/inverter which had was not charging their genset battery or monitoring its voltage and not correctly monitoring the main battery bank current.
I'm now desperate to get ashore and go for a long walk.