As I wrote earlier in the blog, my trickle charge during the lengthy storage failed and my main battery bank was dead when I got back to Zanshin. I had at first thought that the damage wasn’t permanent or was at least manageable since it did take days to slowly bring the bank back up to capacity. Unfortunately the batteries are pretty dead after all. After charging the bank to 100% and turning off the power source, the voltage drops immediately from over 28V to 25V and is soon hovering just over 24V, in the morning I have only consumed 60A out of the 480A bank (@24V) but the battery bank voltage reads around 23.5V; this charge would indicate a battery bank that is almost 50% discharged! So I’m going to bite the bullet and have to replace my complete battery bank; they have sealed maintenance-free batteries from Vetus at Budget Marine which I am going to get and I can fit a total of 4x220A in my battery boxes (there’s room to spare, but not enough for 2 more batteries). That will let me have a house bank with a total capacity of 440Ah@24V, which means that I can consume about 180Ah while not going below 60% total capacity, thus increasing the total battery lifespan significantly. I use about 60A per day, most of it for the fridge and freezer, so I would either run the generator every third day to replenish the banks or when my solar system is complete I could conceivably be putting 600W/Hrs per panel into the bank, meaning I might have as much as 30A per day surplus to run things like cooking and the watermaker or (when there’s a lot of surplus), to heat water. Perhaps I won’t have to run the generator much for very long periods of time, if the sun plays along nicely and I don’t discover other means to drain the battery.
I joined Mark for a dinner at the local German restaurant, Bavaria, and we had a good meal of “Sauerbraten” along with German beer and wines. But in typical cruiser fashion it was difficult to stay up and awake too long and my 22:00 I was reading a couple of pages in my book and preparing to get blown around the anchorage that night. The winds are not as consistently strong as they were, but some of those gusts are impressive indeed and I even had a cockpit cushion blown overboard, something that had never happened before.
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