In order to prepare our floating home for true offshore cruising, providing enough battery capacity to meet our ongoing power requirements, while also allowing us to run our air conditioning units as needed, we determined that we would require a battery house bank that consisted of at least 1500 amp hours of capacity. We chose to install five RELiON LiFEP04 lithium batteries, each rated at 300 amp hours, for a total of 1500 amp hours. We determined that the RELiON LiFEP04 batteries have an excellent reputation when it comes to performance and efficiency, and we chose these batteries because of the integrated BMS (battery management system).
Now in order to effectively charge these batteries, we would need to have approximately 3400 watts of solar power. Thus, we chose to install six 380-watt high efficiency LG solar panels to sit on a new stainless steel solar gantry. An added benefit of this setup is that it provides an enormous amount of shade for the dinghy and the cockpit.
We also added two 330-watt walk-on flex panels mounted on top of the flybridge. This allows us to access the sail bag without fear of breaking the panels. All of this, added to the four 120-watt Solara flex panels that came with the boat, gave us 3,480 watts of total solar power.
In order to power all of this, we installed a Victron Quattro 5kw inverter/charger. This allows us to run up to two air conditioning units at the same time without requiring us to install soft starts. This now gives us two inverters: the Victron and the Cristec that came with the boat.
The work was done by Chris Spencer and his team at Dedicated Marine in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. This was a huge project that took over three weeks. We lived on the boat while the work was being done. It was a mess much of the time but the boat was still quite livable. We were only without power on a few occasions for a couple of hours. The install team did a great job of making sure we weren’t inconvenienced too much while we lived on the boat. The time it took and the disarray of the boat was well worth it. Our offshore cruising home has never been more prepared for adventure.
