100% Solar Electric Catamaran, Interview with owners from Indigo Lady

it's certainly a unique you know boat that you have here our primary propulsion for sole propulsion is solar electric so we're early implementers is what they would yes and which comes with headaches because you can't possibly conceive of all of the engineers the people who designed it they can't us we can't possibly conceive of how it's going to play out in the real world it's not like you can build a test one and test it out before you start selling it well i'm lisa former educator early retiree living on a boat because of him [Laughter] and i'm dave who's always wanted a boat like this for years i started out as a chemist and an engineer and a teacher and then retired to build this boat and plan on cruising the caribbean in it we first got hooked on catamarans when my brother bought a fontaine pejo and put it in the chatter business down in belize and i took a couple vacations on it and really loved living on a catamaran but i'm not a sailor so i like the idea of a power boat and being a physics teacher and alternative energies i got the idea of taking a catamaran taking the mast and sails off from it putting a roof on it with solar panels and electric motors and having a power boat that was powered by the sun and the more i thought about it the more i liked the idea and i eventually convinced lisa and then we started looking at boats and we went down to florida and looked at one similar catamaran to this that was for sale and when we stepped on that boat in florida and i walked in and saw the layout of the salon and galley i said i can live on something this love the back we call it the back porch with the teeth we love the teak between the tramps in the front because it makes anchoring easier gives me a place to do yoga so i re i really liked that layout so then we just we were working with a broker to help us find boats and we said we want something like this and he he found this for us uh this is a voyage 440. 2002 it was a it was a charter boat so it was laid out with four cabins four heads i looked at power cats and all of the power cats that were on the market were narrower for the same length and they all had two or three or 400 horsepower diesels in each engine and a thousand gallon fuel tank and that just wasn't my style the idea of going green and having a small carbon footprint uh really appealed to me and not being a sailor that meant alternative energy it probably would have come down to cost ultimately anyways because there aren't very many power cats in the charter business oh yeah the power cats are fairly fairly recent and fairly expensive and because i knew we were going to be taking the mast and the sails off and the diesels out we could look for an older charter boat where the engines were starting to get tired the sails had a lot of usage on them the standing rigging was about ready to get replaced so all of the things that would normally be maintenance expenditures on an older sailboat we were taking off i had figured it would take about two years to get the job done and i could either keep working for two years and pay somebody else to do it or quit early and do it myself so i quit early and we hauled the boat in september of 2016. yes and relaunched it in september of 2017 50 weeks later so it took me 50 weeks to do the conversion i'd given myself two years the budget was around 200 000 for the boat and around 150 for the entire refit and that includes a year at a boat yard having a crane come in to lift the boat out of the water and put it on the hard and then reverse it again when it goes back into the water building the roof and the panels and all of the materials and installations we came in about on budget so about 200 000 to buy the boat initially and about 150 for the refit one of the reasons i was on budget was the u.s government gives a 30 tax credit for solar and because this is our living space converting it to solar was completely covered including building the roof all of the solar panels the electric motors the entire electric system we designed it so that we could do 20 miles a day island hopping without having to run a diesel so i've got 20 solar panels at 360 watts each so 7.2 kilowatts of solar panels i've got super b lithium iron phosphate batteries i've got two 48 volt banks for a combined 16 kilowatt hours of battery uh 48 volt the two electric motors by ocean volt are 15 kilowatt motors each and i was really skeptical 15 kilowatts equates to 20 horsepower if you just do the standard math conversion but the difference in torque between electric motors and diesel motors these 15 kilowatt motors provide almost exactly the same performance that the 40 horsepower diesels provided now they've got better props because he can use a three blade higher pitch prop with an electric motor versus a two blade with diesels but performance wise it's worked out pretty well and we've got a diesel gen set in each hull for backup or for cruising around the clock right and because it's a catamaran i split the boat right down the middle and have two identical redundant systems with the ability to cross connect between the two max speed if we just push it right to the limit is about seven knots and that's with a clean hull and no current that's just pushing it with the with the motors typical cruising speed is around five knots that that's sort of the sweet spot of the boat where it's a reasonable energy consumption uh reasonable amount of time we can cruise at distances we can go okay we can get what somewhere between 15 and 25 miles just on battery these batteries have a 1c charging rating so they can take 160 amps charging but they've got a 3c discharge rating so they can actually give 450 amps discharge 300 amps would be our 15 kilowatt motor running flat out so they've got a little more ability to give up electricity than what we need but because you can cycle them deeply and frequently uh and they're a lot lighter weight we did a this was a refit on an existing boat so i had to fit batteries into existing space so that was a prime consideration that and the fact that they're ungodly expensive would you be able to go x speed uh and actually produce enough energy on a nice sunny day to almost keep up with exactly what you were using yeah if it's a nice sunny day um about four knots sometimes four and a half with just incoming solar and one of the other major benefits that this retrofit has done is in order to accommodate all of the solar panels we had to build a 600 square foot roof to put them on and having a 600 square foot shade roof for the caribbean is awesome it acts as a little wind scoop in the bow so we get a little bit of a breeze back in the cockpit under most circumstances and we've got shade most of the places on the boat we don't have air conditioning on the boat and we don't anticipate needing it one thing i did and i'm not sure it's entirely necessary but i like the idea of it on the roof when we built it because it's so wide i didn't want to have a 30 foot by 18 foot wing up on top of the boat that could catch a hurricane force wind and do all sorts of damage so i designed it in two halves with a 12 inch gap between the two halves so that as wind is coming across the boat it has an escape path to go and then i put a 20 inch wide walkway above the gap so that i could have radar and antennas and that sort of stuff and access to the roof up on top of that and that has worked out well and hopefully in hurricane season we'll find out or not will not find out how effective that is but it seems like it should be beneficial we've had some good gust storms that she's done well at because of the aluminum framework that supports the roof we now have a continuous metal structure all around the top and sides so i turned that into a lightning protection system and have heavy wires running from the posts down to dynaplates in the water at the surface at the four corners of the boat and up on the roof i have a series of spikes in places so that if a charge builds up on the surface of the water that charge should be carried up through the roof structure to those pointed uh points and dissipate out into the air to reduce the likelihood of a hit from lightning again we hope to never test it but that that's one thing that should be working in our favor and because all of that metal framework is connected to the water and connected to the sky by spikes if there is ever a hit this should act like a faraday cage and we shouldn't get the lightning going into the inside of the boat where we're living and our electric propulsion system is not connected to it so it's isolated from it as the technology gets more mature and more dependable a simpler design would have one generator of pretty good size one large battery bank one solar array and one inverter whereas i have two of everything having two of everything has bailed us out a couple times when one component fails you're still able to get back into port and run on half a system and that the generators are sized such that you can run two electric motors off from one generator and run them at about three quarter power and still have it work fine and even when you're doing that you're still getting the full solar input so you can get full solar input and drive two motors with one generator even if you lose all your batteries and one generator they're 17 kilowatt generators which are close coupled into a 40 horsepower volvo diesel four-cylinder diesel we knew we could do a lot electric so we have we do have propane but we've heard that it can be difficult to refill propane in some countries so we were thinking we have a lot of power so we have a bread maker we have a griddle waffle iron we have a microwave convection oven we have a kick and ninja blender a little mini food processor electric water here we keep a vacuum cleaner water maker ice maker ice maker yep we bought the ice maker and the water maker installed those tv stereo it is so funny you do we have a lot of power but you can't use it all at once switching from land life to boat it usually takes one morning of turning oh we have an electric ticket turning on the electric tea kettle in the microwave really shouldn't happen at the same time in the water and the water heater will trip something so you just have to get used to what you can put on at the same time what you can't you can't forget you can't get can't slip back into that land life of you can turn everything on at once if you want can't do that oh we have a washing machine too which runs on electricity and spin dry cycle i think the biggest challenge was fitting everything into existing spaces and what do i take out how do i relocate everything where do i run all the wiring how do i redo the nav station so all the controls make sense and are easy to get to how do i redo the helm station for the controls and stuff the way i want it what electronics do i want to add the boat had a handheld gps as its sole electronics because in the british virgin islands you go from this island that you see to that island that you see to that island so we had to redo the complete electronic suite and since i'm somewhat of a geek i also wanted to have forward scan sonar and side scan sonar radar and ais for converting a boat there are a number of options buying an older boat out of charter like we did has the advantage of tired diesels and older sails and rigging that are going to be removed and therefore don't have to be replaced and expensed but also uh hurricane damaged boats when the hurricanes hit the caribbean and piled up so many catamarans there were so many dismasted catamarans that could be purchased quite inexpensively that the hulls were still in pretty good shape and some of them the engine rooms had been flooded so the diesels had been flooded and if you're doing a conversion to solar electric those are great opportunities so on on insurance we ended up contacting boat us and cause i'd had insurance with them in the past and when they said we could have caribbean coverage without exclusions for times i was really skeptical at first but we did manage to get them to agree to it and send it in writing to us and it's been really awesome and i think the fact that we're a power boat instead of a sailboat so we don't have to have a certain number of people on board we don't have to have the standing rigging been replaced within x amount of time uh it's been it's been pretty good he has a facebook page indigo lady conversion to solar and that's where he talks about the systems then i've got a lot of the data the performance data the specifications a lot of the technical stuff is in there i do the social media end so i have a facebook page of life on life on lady um i have an instagram account that's at life on lady and i blog it's at lisamarkey.com so i do the uh it's called life only but the domain is lisamarcy.com so i do the social media aspect what's it like living aboard it's more it's more personal journal that i'm just putting out there for anyone to read and he does the technical stuff my email is of easy one for it dave on indigo lady gmail perfect all right well thank you guys i really appreciate it [Music]

Channel: Wildly Intrepid Sailing

Views: 280,709

Keywords: electric catamaran, 100% solar catamaran, oceanvolt, volvo Penta, voyage 440, power catamaran, all electric boat, solar powered boat, electric conversion, solar panel, boat refit, indigo lady

Id: ZWiC4kVCGXI

Length: 15min 49sec (949 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 26 2022