Christine and I have discussed this over the last year, and following much of the blog posts from other owners, the general wisdom has been the boat requires so much power that you’d need 20 panels to generate enough power to provide appreciable dent in the generator usage.

After cruising for the last two months we have a better perspective on what power we need. Our N62 does not have the big sub-zero refrigeration and freezer systems that are on the newer boats. Instead, we have four separate refrigeration units which we can turn off one at a time if we are not using them all. We have electric heads and halogen lights (LEDs are the next project) but we tried to keep them off as much as we can. If we sit an anchor for 24 hours we find we need 3.5 to 4 hours of generator time – which we need for the stove, oven and any heat or air-conditioning. We have 2040 amp hours at 12 volts (8 x 8D Lifeline AGM batteries – 255 aH each). We use about 15% (300 amp hours) of our batteries in a day for refrigeration and other 12v needs. After talking to our sailor friends, we believe a 1kw solar system could actually make a big difference for our boat.

Solar Project / Expectations

The biggest challenge with solar panels on a boat is where to put them. We decided we would have room for 4 x 235 watt panels on the aft pilothouse bimini. The challenge – our very wimpy bimini would not hold enough weight to support even one panel. After a conversation with Ari Kreiss at Cabo Yacht Center, we decided to have Cabo Yacht Center build a new stainless bimini frame similiar to those on other N62s – only designed to support 150 lbs of solar panels – and able to withstand wind and motion while underway. Looking at the hundreds of sport fishers – most with HUGE tuna towers in Cabo – we decided this was the place to have the aft bimini constructed.

Cabo Yacht Center

Christine researched our panel and controller options and with a good friend in the industry providing other technical advice, decided on Sharp Panels and an Outback controller. Luckily we found a good dealer to get them to Cabo.

Solar panels

Outback controller

The project ended up taking longer than we had anticipated. But Cabo Yacht Center did deliver high quality work – we are very impressed with the final product.

Our expectation is in good sunlight we should see 200 amps of power generation during the day, with upside to 300 amps. This would mean when we sit more than one day at anchor – we will only need the generator for that one hour of cooking. We will post on our actual experience in terms of power generation once we have a few weeks of experience.