System Design for Sailboat

[OKENGR]

Greetings and thanks for adding me!

I have a 40' sailboat for which I'm contemplating a change to LifePo4 and solar. I already have some equipment, but have not settled on the optimum configuration or made the final selection of some remaining major components.

I already have (2) Kyocera 210W panels with (2) Victron MPPT 75/15 controllers and breakers for line and load side of the controllers, but none of this has been installed yet. I also have a Champion 3100W inverter generator set up on LP gas that I plug into the shore power inlet.

My present charger/inverter is a Xantrex Freedom 20 with Heartlink 2000 monitor. It's modified square wave and not sufficiently programmable so I'm inclined to replace it. House bank is (3) 90Ah Walmart deep cycle flooded in parallel at 12V, and (1) Walmart engine start battery connected to the Echo output on the Xantrex. The alternator is 65A internally regulated and connected to the start battery.

Existing loads are 12V and include a 700W windlass, chart plotter, radar, autopilot, bilge pumps, domestic water pump, refrigeration, fans, and LED cabin and navigation lighting. On the 120V side there is a 1400W convection oven, small refrigerator, TV, 16000 BTU water cooled heat pump, water heater and convenience power. I have an LP Gas instantaneous water heater I use while under way so the need for electric water heating is negated when away from shore power. There is also a 12V water maker, but the motor may have received water damage and I plan to replace it with a 120V AC motor and use the generator to operate it.

My inclination is toward 200Ah to 400Ah of GBS LifePo4 cells with the RV BMS/Contactor package from Starlight Solar. I am also considering (2) more 200W solar panels and (2) more Victron 75/15 controllers to go with them. For the inverter/charger I'm inclined to the Victron Multiplus 12/2000/80.

I'm very interested to hear your recommendations on the best setup and equipment selection based on these parameters. Thanks in advance for your knowledgeable advice.

Julian

[Mike90250]

Plain windows notepad, with stock setting's, ANSI encoding, works. Anything with formatting and non standard character sets gets interpreted as spam and is truncated

Browsers with plain fonts and unaltered text settings, work.

Phones and tablets often don't work. I have no idea about mac's

[OKENGR]

OK, I finally got the original post fixed. Please take a look and give me your thoughts. Thanks!

[Mike90250]

First, off-load the big loads to the generator: longer than 3 min in the microwave, heat pump, convection oven, water heater The batteries just can't hold up to those loads.

400w of solar, in excellent conditions (not a sailboat) is not going to keep the fridge going unless it's super super efficient. On a boat, less likely, so you are going to run the generator 2x a day to charge the batteries to keep the fridge cold.

Do you have any idea what the power consumption of the autopilot and radar are ? that's going to be a factor.

[OKENGR]

I'm with you on the large AC loads. My primary coincident continuous load desires for the house bank are chart plotter/radar, autopilot, 12V refrigeration, 120V refrigerator, fans, and TV. There will also be some device chargers going for an ipad at the helm station and an iphone or two.

The chart plotter/radar draws 64W during the day and 49W at night (brighter screen during day). The autopilot is more difficult to estimate but the best information I can find suggests about 65Ah per day in calm conditions and 200Ah per day in storm conditions. The 12V refrigeration draws 60W while running, and I would guess it might run half the time depending on how often you open the lid.