Risa’s solar panel is on her stern, she is parked bow to the south, which compounds the poor angle of solar radiation. Further reductions are caused by shadows of not only my backstay, but by those caused by the boats around me. With all these factors, I was down to about 4 hours of OK […]
Winter
It comes every year. This winter, Risa is on the hard, out of the water, for the winter. It has been 10 years since her last winter out.
Application Report
It’s now September. The solar panel has kept the refrigerator running all season. On those rare days that the batteries were not at 100% by dusk, they were the next day. Most of these days have been since Labor Day. Seems there are more cloudy days and less hours of potential sunshine to boot. Soon, […]
Heatwave
We’re into the second week of our 2019 heat wave. They usually last about two weeks and it is forecast to break this coming week. I have found that overnight energy consumption has tripled during this period, presumably due to the refrigerator needing to run more to maintain temperature. Before the heat wave, with much […]
Maelstorm
On June 30, 2019 a severe squall pummeled our harbor. Many trees were ripped out of the ground. I saw one photo that looked like a twister. There were reports of 88 mph winds by one friend who rode the storm out with his boat on his mooring. Here are several pics that I pulled […]
The Internet
One of the perks of being an Optimum Cable customer is the relatively easy to find wifi hot spots. Risa was able to have a connection not only on her mooring, but even while sailing in the bay! A high power bridge and large omnidirectional antenna combination made this possible. This spring the optimum SSID […]
Monitoring the Bateries
Perhaps the most important battery measurement is its state of charge. It can be inferred by the resting state voltage reading of the batteries, but more precise would be to track the amps as they move in and out of the bank. The most reliable way to do this is with a shunt. A shunt […]
It’s Always Something!!
August 27, 2018 at 11:35 am. Checked a camera view from the website this morning. It showed me a picture taken at 7:50am. It was nearly noon. Did the Pi crash? Tried logging in, fully expecting to be told that the connection was offline. Nope, logged right in, no problem, so what’s up? The shots […]
A Droning we will go!
Two years ago, I purchased a Splash Drone – this quadrocoptor could take off and land in water, yes even salt water! Trying it out at home, found that there were too many trees around to learn to fly. Once the replacement parts were installed and a new case arrived, off to the boat it […]
Morningstar MPPT-60 Known Issue?
Risa is experiencing a problem with the solar charge controller. It began with values being reported via the web interface and modbus/tcp requests being clearly wrong. It would sometimes show that the array was producing zero amps, even though the battery was receiving charges in excess of 10 amps. Other times, it showed values orders […]