Power Hogs

Klinging to the coattails of a futurist By the numbers

Power Hogs

By Mike Jastrzebski

When it comes to cruising I guess you could say that Mary and I are power hogs. Since we prefer to be on the hook or when necessary a mooring ball, this can be a problem. On the hook in the summer we have four fans running 24/7. We also have refrigeration, but what makes us power hogs are the extras. We have an inverter on board with three computers plus an iPad, an iPod, two Kindles, a 32 inch TV, a radio, a phone, a chart plotter, radar, a VHF radio with AIS, a Ham radio, and finally our watermaker. All of these electronics, both the toys and the necessities, require a lot of power, usually 150 plus amps a day.

So how do we handle it? One of the first things we bought when we were just beginning to cruise was a Honda 2000 generator. We didn’t have anywhere near the toys or boat electronics that we have now, but we found that when we were at anchor we needed to run the generator 3-4 hours a day to keep our four golf cart batteries topped off.

Last year we added three 140 Watt solar panels and two additional golf cart batteries. If we had sunny skies and ran the engine occasionally as we moved the boat this allowed us to go many days, even weeks without starting the generator.

Now that we’ve added the watermaker we have once again become more dependent on the generator. We have a CruiseRO 110 volt watermaker. It puts out 20 gallons per hour and runs on the generator. We only have two water tanks on Rough Draft. One is 20 gallons and the other is 25 gallons. We go through a tank of water every 2-3 days which means we have to run the generator and watermaker every 2-3 days to keep the tanks full. This is not a bad thing since the watermaker has to be run every 3-5 days to keep the membrane clean and healthy. This also means that we get a couple of hours a week of battery charging from the generator.

I’d love to hear from any cruisers out there who would like to share how many amp hours you use a day while at anchor.

For anyone interested my historical thriller, The Storm Killer, is on sale for only .99 this week.