I met Jim Funk at his loft last Saturday to build the racks for Gypsy's new solar panels. I showed up a bit early and couldn’t help but walk the docks and gaze at the beauties.
When I say that I helped Jim build the solar panel racks, what I mean is that I held the tape measure for him and said "yes" to his terrific ideas as how they should be made. Jim has a great design sense and is a genius with stainless steal construction. I couldn't be more pleased with how the racks came out.
This solar array will form the heart of our planned electric power system. I'm hoping that we'll be able to get at least 90% of our electrical power from the sun. To that end we're doing two major things; 1) reducing our electrical needs to as little as possible and 2) fielding the largest solar array that's practical.
We'll be completely covering our bimini with solar panels. Our array will be comprised of
two 40" x 65" Sharp 224 watts panels that will hopefully produce about 150 amp hours of electricity on sunny days. On the conservation side we'll be doing things like installing LED lights and putting in a high efficiency refrigeration system if we have the amp hours to spare. What we want to avoid is running our big diesel engine just to make power. We also got a small 2000 watt Honda generator to make up the difference between what the sun produces and what we need. The Honda will also serve as an emergency back up to our power system. It seems like a good idea to have redundant sources of energy.
Of course Gypsy's biggest energy collectors are her sails which are capable of moving her across oceans by the force of the wind.
249 days...
