Spruzzo has 2x400W Sunpower Solar Panels. I purchased a Solar Charger controller for each panel (Victron MPPT Regulator 150/30) which is the most efficient configuration (the controllers can optimize individually for each panel given how much sun that panel is receiving) but I’m not sure this was efficient financially because the controllers were expensive.
I can now see what is going on with the batteries in terms of charging because of the Cerbo GX monitoring system which I recently added. If I was smarter, I probably could have figured this out by looking at the battery display I had before…..but it was not obvious. Looking at graphs of data over days makes things easier 😉
On a usual sunny day here (almost all of them) the solar panels have fully-recharged the batteries before 3pm. They are generating something over 5 kWh in a day. The batteries are supporting 2 fridge/freezers, the usual lights/pumps found on a boat, 2 laptops, 2 phones, a medium size flatscreen TV, a google-home device, a router and a small Raspberry Pi computer. (I just checked and the average Canadian household in Ontario uses 26 kWh/day.) Outside of the usual loads, I always make 8 shots of espresso with our semi-automatic espresso machine and make enough frothy hot milk for 2 coffees (this uses a good amount of electricity). Everything else, plus the coffee, plus one run of our dishwasher and the solar panels can keep up. If we do 2 loads of dishes (very rare) then they don’t quite fully charge the batteries.
We haven’t started running any AC (have only needed that at dock in the past when hooked up to shore power).
In the past I would always run the generator to run the watermaker (2L/hour of diesel to make 180L/hour of water)…….but I might be able to run that as well off of the batteries and still get fully-charged by the end of the day. I’m not sure this matters because I would need to run the generator anyway to re-charge the batteries….and I don’t need to make water every day anyway.
In summary last year I would run the generator for 1 hour in the morning to top up the batteries and usually 1.5 hours at night to fully charge them and make water if necessary. After adding the solar panels I can now not run the generator at all on most days. 2.5 hours of generator running is 5L of diesel/day I am not burning……I’m probably down to only needing 30 minutes of generator a day which is 1L of diesel so I’m saving 4L/day.
Good financial savings from solar and less pollution!
Adventures on Spruzzo 