Converting a boat to electric: What it costs

[@petarjovicic3311]

Finally someone, thank you!

[@SailingElectra]

Glad you found it useful Petar

[@CaptainShack]

Great breakdown. Thanks!

[@SailingElectra]

Cheers Captain

[@mudislander864]

Like your set up, all looks good and totally agree, more panels. One point I noted, you don't have any protection in the form of lightning arrester surge protection on your panels. You might want to look into this, just a suggestion. You have some expensive kit there

[@SailingElectra]

Thanks for that. And yeah lightning does worry me. I have no idea what would work to protect it. I've seen some things and then see some people saying they make things worse and that lightning is impossible to protect against. Any advice would be great, at the moment my strategy is simply to not have the tallest mast around :)

[@bryhan67]

Since there is not much space on a sailboat I wonder if you could but a thin flexible or standard panel under the existing panel? Bifacial down side is they are bigger so per SQ FT they are not much advantage. Im sure the sun reflect off the water and any free power would be a bonus. Wonder if anyone has tried this or tested the idea? I guess a way to test would be turn the existing panles upside down and see the power they produce from the sun reflection off the water.

[@SailingElectra]

That's a very good question actually! I've become very weight sensitive to adding things to my boat, so I won't be the one to try, but yeah I imagine it would work as well as the extra wattage you get on bifacials. I suspect we'll keep seeing more innovation in this area.

[@robmoore6323]

Nice job I’m still looking around for the cat I will make electric …. 3 years until I retire hoping to do the great loop in USA

[@SailingElectra]

Thanks Rob. Good luck with your search. I'd love to do the great loop too at some point!

[@brikler7717]

I have the same hope. Have been looking at Geminis and Catalac Catamarans. Hope to see you on the Loop. Also, thinking of a side trip to the Bahamas.

[@brentsumner6422]

Thanks so much for making these informative videos. You do a great job explaining the process while making it pleasant to watch. I have a 40ft sailing cat in the Ssan Juan Islands and share your idea of the panels create the power, battery size is second to that. I'm just switching out my solar array for 550 watt bi facial panels, they are the largest output per sqft I've seen, plus they catch reflected light of the water on the undersides. I'm pretty sure I'd make terrible videos but I'd like to document how they perform over the summer.

[@SailingElectra]

Thanks for the great feedback Brent. What kind of boat do you have, and how much solar will you have in the end?

[@brentsumner6422]

The boat is a Rudy Choi design, called a Polynesian, built 1973, 20ft beam. The array is 3.3kw from the topside, they get 15-20 percent extra from reflected light in a ground mount situation, but I imagine reflected light off the water should be significantly higher with all the panels over the cockpit

[@davedyck3982]

I'd like see that setup! Make a few videos...maybe it's fun! 😂

[@LeonBerrange]

Thank you (fellow Saffie) I have just bought a 9M Catalac which has 2 decent Beta 14s in, but some rather dodgy saildrives. I am hoping to convert to electric sooner rather than later. The old saildrives have no spares available, so at some point they will be a dead-end.

[@SailingElectra]

Wow another saffa with a 9M, who would have guessed! You're lucky you can sell the motors to get some money back. Mine were dead so I got almost nothing. One thing to consider is outboards vs pods. Doing it again I would seriously consider pods so they're deeper in the water and further apart. Costs are about the same. Where is your boat?

[@sailingrollingstone8723]

@@SailingElectra Hey I switched to my boat identity. I know, right? Coincidence or Great Minds or what? As soon as I started researching I found your channel. Tomorrow I am off to Lowestoft on the North Sea coast to take delivery. I will be heading for Cowes to 'borrow' a whole lot of gear off my old ferro Endurance 35 (SV Rolling Stone). Then off to the Med via French canals. Where are you? I would so love to see your lovely Catalac! No name for the Catalac yet.

[@ooooobpbpbpooooo]

Super clear, thanks to you and your pup! Did the ePropulsion firm help you with your setup? I'm guessing warranty is void with non-OEM batteries?

[@SailingElectra]

No, it was all DIY. I actually expect the warranty to still hold, and from speaking to a dealer (not the one I bought from) that does seem to be the case. Of course if you damage something by using a battery that's out of specs it wouldn't, but as long as I'm within the recommended specs I should be good.

[@LostYogi]

quiet expensive, but as you conclude diesel engines would cost around the same and you would keep paying for fuel on those.

[@SailingElectra]

Plus my wife wouldn't live on a boat that smelt like diesel, so I either avoided a divorce or another rent payment 😂

[@LostYogi]

@@SailingElectra 😆

[@fredflintstone1428]

Thanks for sharing those costs Patrick. Funny you should have posted this video today, as after 12 weeks of working on my solar powered cat, I sat down today to ''do the books'. I'll share the costs with other videos once the cat is complete.

[@SailingElectra]

Glad you found them useful. The only charge I might have made doing it again would be for pods instead of outboards, though I'm still not sure which is better. Are you keeping the mast or going for a powerboat build?

[@fredflintstone1428]

@@SailingElectraThe cat has been started as a power cat, so no mast. It was built with the idea of two petrol outboards, spec'd at 60HP each but could be any size up to 200HP. I'm talking to Epropulsion UK at the moment and thinking of having twin Navy 6.0 on each hull. I should be fitting the 6kW of panels to the roof next week all being well. I'm undecided on whether to fit steering to the outboards or have a single central rudder. I certainly don't want to fit anything under the hulls to protect against grounding. Neither would i want to fit pods for the same reason.

[@SailingElectra]

@@fredflintstone1428 missed this message. I like the route you're going with four 6kW motors rather than one big one. So many advantages from redundancy to what I think will be outstanding efficiency gains. I gain 10%+ more speed for the same power consumption running two motors rather than one at double power. I suspect the effect with four will be even better. I've got a friend covering a Fontaine Pajot Cumberland 46, but he's planning for shaft drive. I suspect four 6kW would do the job in his case too, and quite possibly could be cheaper.

[@alanbutterworth4219]

@@SailingElectra Hi Patrick, Slight update on the cat. The 6kw panels are in place but unfortunately the Epropulsion motors, Navy 6 are not working out. They cannot get them to talk to one another and the controllers in a meaningful way, therefore I would have to use four independent motors and four controllers. They can get a pair to be controlled in 'sync' mode but it would require two dual controllers...not the end of the world but a bigger problem would be the steering. The cat has no rudders, so was going to use hydraulic steering coupled to the motors. I don't think it would have been possible to do this with a pair either side of the cat and there was always the problem of tilt too. So in the end I returned to the initial idea of using Aquamot Trend 15.0 outboards. These are a 48V, 15kW motor, the biggest I know of at 48V. I've ordered them last week and they begin building them in a couple of weeks in Austria. They are meant to be equivalent to a 35HP outboard. I find that a little optimistic...maybe a 25-25HP, but who knows? Maybe the efficiencies gained in having no transmission and the cooling done by the water achieve this. If they do replicate a 35HP ICE outboard, the cat should be really well balanced in terms of power of motors and available battery power. I hope to be heading down towards the Med by late September or before if things go well. I will release the build videos on KZbin once the cat is finished, but want to keep the project private at the moment for security.

[@otleyshev68]

Hi Thankyou for your tutorial of the boat . Fantastic . Got to ask if you was to have the sail up do the motors Regenerate with the force of the forward motion . ? Be really intrested to know this ? As I’ve heard that some boat electric motors do this ?? Also if your sailing might sound silly but do the motors spin freely with no power going throw them this not to course drag . I did build a Electric campervan aprox 5 years ago On KZbin …. james and Kate electric campervan My dream is to lurn to sail and then buy a yacht and convert to vertical wind turbine and solar pv and keep in Spain I congratulate your achievements . 👍🏽👊🏽🙌🏾

[@SailingElectra]

It's possible but only if you use the epropulsion batteries, and I don't, so that means I don't get regen. I have enough solar though, so it isn't really necessary, and most of the time I'll keep the motors on when sailing, as even very low power means a big speed boost.

[@JOATMOFA]

Great informative video ! You have : 2 x 3kW (6kW) motors; 16 x 3.2V/280Ah (14kWh) battery; 8 x 400Wp (3.2kWp) solar panels; Do you find the solar panels adequate? Is there sufficient battery storage? Are the motors powerful enough? I ask, because I am doing *EXACTLY* the same in a few months time!

[@SailingElectra]

The motors are 2 x 6kW (12kW) but to be honest I almost never go over 3kW, and I've never thought they were underpowered. The key to the system is the solar. If I had less solar I'd probably think the battery was too small. The Hopyacht 30 has twice the battery and half the solar but because I have so much more solar I can travel further without needing to plug in. On a summer's day I pull in 15kWh+ and that means my battery pack is pretty much always full. My solar panels alone can power me at 5 knots without draining the battery on a sunny day, so the battery becomes a buffer rather than a power source. On cloudy days a bigger pack would just mean more speed, but I don't mind showing down if I need to go further when it's cloudy. From this season I hope to be sailing as well. If I didn't have sails I'd consider a Honda 2200 generator which could move me at 4-5 knots as long as it has fuel, but with the sails I think I'm happy with no generator.

[@JOATMOFA]

@@SailingElectra Thanks for the reply.

[@JOATMOFA]

@@SailingElectra Thanks for that info. Being a fellow Saffa, I will probably go the same route as yourself. Where would one look for a good used catamaran?

[@TaylanYalniz]

Great video

[@SailingElectra]

Thanks!

[@SailingSquib]

Why is the rigging so expensive? I bought all new wires with new terminals for about 1200€. The most expensive has been the isolators for the SSB Radio, two of them was around 600E. A rollerfurl is around 2000-2500€

[@SailingElectra]

Croatian pricing! Paid 3k for the furler and had to build a new tabernacle. Because my boat has changed from standard and because the boat was new to me I had to have a rigger do everything. From next time I'll go the DIY route.

[@TheDigitalMermaid]

Do you not use a t-class fuse if the lfp bank?

[@SailingElectra]

No, I've only got a single 48V280AH pack, it shouldn't be capable of providing the kind of amps a T Class fuse is necessary for. The mega 400A fuse I'm using was supplied by the battery and BMS supplier. Like so many things on my boat, fire extinguisher, EPIRB, etc I hope I never need to put it to use 😁

[@TheDigitalMermaid]

@@SailingElectra if I could humbly suggest; they can, I accidentally shorted my single battery while designing the box for my own sailboat conversion. The incredibly low internal resistance of the lfp allows them to dump kiloamps in a dead short, which can arc over an ANL or similar fuse. I put a large t-class as close to the main bank positive as the "fuse of last resort", with the ANLs sized smaller to protect the wires.

[@SailingElectra]

@@TheDigitalMermaid thanks for the advice, I'll certainly look into it. It shouldn't be a huge job adding one to my pack. I don't suppose you had the camera running when you short circuited it? Would be very interesting to see.

[@TheDigitalMermaid]

@@SailingElectra I did... kzbin.info/www/bejne/fpnMdp6va5l1gsk

[@michaelanderson1788]

👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍

[@SailingElectra]

👍😁

[@martinhildebrand]

Nice overview, What's the capacity of your batteries in kWh?

[@SailingElectra]

It's just about 14.4kwh, though my large solar array means on a typical day I actually have more than double that available to me 😊

[@pb-jl8jl]

I have a 78 Oceanic CAT in tampa, I want to find someone who wants to help refit to electric. ..following this video

[@SailingElectra]

That's a big boat, I imagine you can have a ton of solar panels! Unfortunately I don't know any experts on your side of the pond, though I'm sure there are a few. I do know an expert in Europe who is actually an American, if you want his details let me know.

[@olafschermann1592]

Your battery is around 14kwh, correct? What range do you get at 3 knots and 6 knots?

[@SailingElectra]

Yes, 14.4kwh. 3 knots is just 500w in total. I can do that non stop forever as I charge at more than that rate even in cloudy weather. 6 knots is 7kw total so if there's no sun I have just 2 hours. Typically I go 4.5-5 knots which is around 2.2kw. when the sun is shining I can do that speed all day long and still have a full battery at the end of the day as I have 3200w of solar.

[@olafschermann1592]

@@SailingElectra thank you

[@JOATMOFA]

@@SailingElectra WOW! So at a steady 3knots power is only 500W; and at 6 knots (double speed) it is 7kW. That is excessive?

[@sergioz7133]

'promosm' 😄