Wednesday 17 October 2012

Wind Power

We have wind power! It was a pretty awesome feeling to finaly get our wind generator up. The last major thing on our list to do before leaving the marina. Still a few minor things left to do.

We installed a sunforce 600 Watt marine wind generator. It is a big bulky thing, but it spins quietly and at starts turning at really low wind speeds. So far the jury is out on performance, but it looks ok.

The pole was another story. If you are planning on getting any work done on your boat, don't plan on Bocas. Cartegena is close or even Shelter Bay. We were quoted a 3 hr job, which took 3 months to do, it was rushed, the quality of steel was low, and it came in twice as expensive as quoted. Not a huge deal as it was still quite cheap, a third the cost of the standardized poles you can buy in the package. For us we are happy to finaly have our custome pole on and done, even if I had to design it, measure it, fit it, and it still came back different than the pictures. Oh well, we now can produce a nice charge to keep the motor turned off.

Jennie and I did a pretty awesome job of installing it too. It is tricky to install a pole on the side of a boat, on a curved stern, with a wing generator on top. We did it, nothing fell in the drink, and no dockside domestic, a win in any cruisers handbook.

Wiring is in too. I started to realize that when the designers created these older boats, they never accomodated for all the new technology that would need to be installed 25 years down the road. I have now added more switches and buss bars in interesting places.

A little beach time after was well deserved.

3 comments:

Gremlins Hammer said...

Awesome that you got your wind turbine up and running! We bought one this past summer for our old boat, but hadn't gotten around to installing it before we sold it and bought the new boat. Can't wait to get it installed on the new boat this fall and see how it does.

Congrats on the successful installation :)

Anonymous said...

Congrats on a new wind gen!

CRAZYCAT said...

LOVE MINE BUT YOU GOT ALL FANCY ON ME! CRAZY CAT