I downloaded a grib file last night to check the weather instead of the usual sites I’ve been trying. It showed today - Wednesday - quite nice, so I planned to finally finish sanding & polishing the hulls. It was already blowing a gale & raining when I woke up so I cursed the stupid web site and decided to stay inside & wire in the solar panels, our new (second hand) cool box in the spare cabin that will strike up when the batteries are full and a permanent stern light. It’s taken all day and about 60m of cable somehow? Luckily I had a reel spare from rewiring the engine which was just enough.
The ends of the cable are coiled at the stern until I come back next time with the welded frame and drill the exit hole, but just to test it I connected one panel resting on the spare bed, mostly in shadow, behind a tinted window at 1830 and it all lit up and started charging. Getting on for £900 for just 128W of power, now I’ve had to redesign the frame and buy another 12 metres of 25mm tube & fittings was starting to seem like a bad idea but it all seems worthwhile now, especially as the frame also doubles to cradle the dingy and permanently mount the stern light (which I usually forget to put out). I think I might even add an ammeter just for that final bit of novelty value, I mean so I can see exactly how well it’s working.
The panels finally stopped charging at about 2000, but luckily as I’m plugged into the mains, the immersion heater & 2KW fan heater still keep going and when I turned the laptop on to have a look at this weather grib for tomorrow, I realised it’s Thursday not Wednesday and the forcast has been right all day.