Here's another plug for Northern Arizona Wind and Sun. I bought two 60-watt Kyocera panels and when I got them I was taken aback at how big they were. I e-mailed the guys at the store and they did the exchange for two 40-watt panels and refunded the difference, no problem.
Good people.
Just in case you're interested....I had two 40 watt panels on a beefed-up stern pulpit on Ankle Biter. The boat was moving so much that a shadow didn't have enough time to sit in one place and significantly effect transmission, so the backstay was irrelevant. I had an e-bay special used 30-watt panel mounted over the companionway. This was a semi-waste of time, as it was almost always shaded by the main or the boom or something. The other e-bay special 30-watt panel was loose. I had a line on it that I could wrap around an unused winch, and a 15 foot long cord from the panel to the regulator. During the day I'd just put it out in the cockpit, with the line as insurance that it wouldn't fall overboard. That worked out pretty well. Total array size was 140 watts, all rigid panels.
That array powered all my SSB use and since I lost my windvane several days out, it powered the Autohelm 2000 that basically drove the boat all the way to Hawaii. I also had a mapping GPS going almost all the time, since that was my knotmeter.
I'd run the batteries down pretty well during the night and they'd get up to about 13 v during the day. Every 3-4 days I'd pull out the little portable inverter and charge my laptops battery. Don't run the laptop, plugged in to the inverter, it's a lot less efficient than charging the laptops battery and then running the laptop off of its own battery.
Finally you will save WADS of energy by using LED bulbs in your navigation lights. Yes, they're expensive, but they are piddly compared to what you will have to go through, if you're on a small boat without an engine, to keep your batteries charged if you're using incandescant nav lights.
Oh, one last thing on energy. You're supposed to have a strobe light "at the masthead" right? You can power that strobe light from here to Tokyo and back on one single 6 volt lantern battery. Yes, the strobe nominally says it's supposed to have 12 volts, but the capacitor in the strobe will store up charge from the 6 volt battery and cause the strobe to discharge just fine. It just discharges a bit less often. My point is that if the doodoo hits the fan and you seriously have no juice, you can wire your strobe to an $10.95 lantern battery and it will blink all the way to Hawaii, telling all the big ships exactly where you are the whole way.
Last edited by AlanH; 02-05-2010 at 07:01 PM.
1968 Selmer Series 9 B-flat and A clarinets
1962 Buesher "Aristocrat" tenor saxophone
Piper One Design 24, Hull #35; "Alpha"