Work Week – Progress Made

April has become a tradition for Bass to blast over to Washington and get a few days of grimy work done. This April was no different, but the work was to be on the cabin, not the sailboat. Big focuses for the cabin have been proper floors (taken care of over the winter by a craftsman who lives on Eliza), reliable power to the house and – a new, unfortunate addition – replacement of the now defunct demand hot water heater that died over the winter.

Travel
Traveling over to Washington was, as always, a bit of an adventure. With loads of stuff to haul (8 golf cart batteries – 500 pounds right there, inverters, battery boxes, miscellaneous bits and pieces of the power setup, a generator, etc etc) Bass used some frequent flyer miles and rented a Ford Explorer that, fortunately, swallowed gear like nobody’s business and made for a pretty easy ride over to Washington.

Of course, getting to Bellingham is only step one. Then everything was hauled down to Boundary (8 dock cart loads!!) and loaded onto the boat. Then, when the batteries in the cockpit plan made Boundary feel a little tender, redistributed the weight so it was lower in the boat (i.e. in the salon!). Made for a full house for Bass’ one night onboard. An early start the next morning to beat a tide dropping to minus 1 and lots more humping of gear eventually got everything onto the island, into the caretaker’s truck, and up to the cabin. Phew!!

At least good overall weather for traveling. A little chilly and overcast on way over to island but clear and sunny that afternoon. When single handing Boundary certainly happy with the EVO-100 autopilot we installed last year.

Water
On a one night overnight at the cabin in March we discovered the hot water heater no longer works, appears to have something clogging its heat exchanger making it so not enough water flows to activate the heater. Since the original heater was 20 years old (we think) and you can’t get spare parts anymore we decided best to upgrade to a newer model. The sole benefit of the old was that it didn’t require power, but since we were building a reliable power system that seemed to be not that important. Fortunately the craftsman who did our floors hooked us up with another highly skilled person who walked us through an almost complete revamping of the water and propane, bringing both up to code and making things a lot safer and a lot more reliable. We now have much better water flow, safer propane appliance setups, a new propane hookup for a future propane heating stove, and hot water galore. An unexpected expense but well worth it!

Power
With a lot of complexity here we decided to go with a two part power plan. Part #1 (done this week) was to get some power storage (in the form of batteries) and set everything up to invert the 48v battery bank to regular 120v power and wire that to the house. For now we’re just charging the batteries with the generator and a quickly cobbled together solar setup (to keep the batteries topped up until we get back) until we can install proper solar charging on our next trip out to the island. The full power setup was first built in the garage at home where we could sort out unforeseen issues, and where we can drive three blocks to the hardware store. Not having what you need when you’re on island is a huge headache. Fortunately, and somewhat surprisingly, the whole install went as hoped, and by the time Bass left we had reliable regular household power to the house.

He even had enough time to install a few light fixtures and cover a few open junction boxes… little things that really don’t take that long but make a HUGE difference. And just having reliable power makes a huge difference… the interior “work room” seemed like it might be great but it was always dark, now just with a single LED lightbulb it’s a wholly usable other room in the cabin… sweet!

And, of course, the return (as we have pledged it should be) was done hauling a bunch of junk and trash back off the island, so it doesn’t accumulate on us. Coming off the dock in 15-20 knots was interesting but a beautiful day and Boundary found her way back to Squallicum all on her own and was snugged in tight as Bass headed back over Snoqualmie towards home.

For anyone interested in the exact wiring scheme, here’s how we did it:
1) Power comes from the generator through an inlet plug to a main breaker box. From the main box power can be routed either directly to the house (into existing breaker box already in house, just like a regular home breaker box) or to the Victron inverter/charger.
2) The Victron inverts the 48v power bank (8 6v golf cart batteries in series) to 120v output that goes to the house (when desired), and also takes power from the generator to charge the batteries.
3) The Victron inverter, however, does use quite a bit of power just on standby, so when we don’t need a lot of power we can switch to a much smaller inverter (Morningstar SureSine) that uses less than 5 watts on standby but still provides 300 watts of inverter power (compared to the 5,000 watts from the Victron), enough to run a few lights and the hot water heater and charge some phones.
4) Various other bits and pieces (48v->12v converter, MPPT charge controller, battery monitor, data consolidator that allows us to use WiFi from the house to check status of everything running in the fridge) filled out the “power wall” that we built and attached to the box that holds the batteries (vented to the outside).

Equipment List:

• Generator: Honda EG2800i
• Breaker panel: Square D by Schneider Electric
• Inverter: Victron Quattro 48/5000/70
• Inverter #2: Morningstar SureSine
• Solar charge controller: Victron MPPT 250/60 (could have used a 150v but that plan change came after purchase of this controller)
• Batteries: Eight (8) Deka GC15 5v golf cart batteries (from Lowe’s)
• Battery monitor: Victron BMV-712
• WiFi Enabled monitoring device: Victron Venus GX
• Three input 120v switch: Blue Sea 8361
• Hot water heater: Rinnai RUCS65I