When you live “off the grid” on a boat you are entranced by, or some would say a slave to, two gauges, the volt gauge and the amp gauge. Actually you have two sets of these fraternal twins so to speak, a set for AC and a set for DC. You watch those things like they are your first born the first week you brought him or her home. As if they are the most fascinating things on earth. You just don’t post their picture on Facebook, well at least most of us don’t. These little gems keep you informed to how much power is available. The DC set display the amount of battery power you have available to run things. Things like your fridge, lights, water pump, radios (VHF, SSB, AM-FM), CD player and all the other 12 V gadgets you have on board. If the power is low you sit in dark, silence because turning those things on consumes power. Naturally you have to have a way to recharge your batteries because they don’t have an endless supply of power to provide. Come up with batteries that do that and you can be one of the sharks on Shark Tank!
The latest in boat happenings is the loss of our battery charger aka the Xantrax unit. This little gem is connected via our 1000W Honda generator to charge our house and starter batteries. We only use it when the wind generator and solar panels don’t provide enough energy to keep the house bank in good shape voltage wise. Dark nights with no wind usually mean we need some charging going on the next morning. Enter the battery charger and generator. The generator provides AC power to the battery charger which converts the AC to DC and sends it to the battery bank. Our charger, which we believe is the original one on the boat (24 years old) gave up the ghost while we were out and about the other day. This is not a good thing and will require replacement. Of course this had to happen on a holiday weekend, a basic boat law known as ‘Object Failure is Directly Proportional to Maximum Time to Procure Replacement”.
Scott and Roger have been conferring diligently about a proper replacement. All the mathematics have to be worked out so that our 1000 W generator can supply the right amount of energy to the new charger which must output enough charge to charge our bank. If all this sounds like a bad credit card balance you could be right! It won’t be inexpensive and most likely will be charged! Did you follow all that?

The picture is the front of the Marina building taken as we left the dingy dock, much more interesting than gauges.