How to Build an Electric Sailboat

hey just check-in and this is gonna be kind of a boring episode but also very informative so if you're into this electric build and you want to learn more about how I'm actually going to make this all work then stay tuned if not then just get this episode it's just a lot of me talking I wanted to give you guys a little bit of an update since I've been working on planning out the boat and ordering parts and talking to companies and trying to get people on board and all that while waiting for my solar panels to arrive and helping Mele move I thought I'd make a little bit of a video to bring you guys up to speed as to what my actual plan is for an electric sail boat now many of you are adamant that I should keep my diesel motor and I understand the draw of that it's very simple and is proven technology and a lot of people do it however for me this boat is a five-year plan minimum so at five years I feel like that keeping it diesel just isn't worth it anymore keeping that motor alive and and spending all that money on gas and having to hunt down gas all the time and instead of just being more off-grid which is what I really like so I decided I would go with a full electric system now to make a full electric system there's a lot of complicated stuff going on and there isn't one solution that works just for well for anybody and everybody so I thought I'd break down my thought process of why I went the ways I went first of all the biggest problem with an electric sail boat is power storage an electric vehicle of any kind power storage if you're looking at lettuce at a GM or six volt batteries they're the cheapest option they run about $155 per kilowatt hour of storage but they have a poor lifespan and they're very heavy at 95 pounds per kilowatt another option is to go with the lithium lipo batteries they're a very high cost battery at 310 dollars per kilowatt hour but they have an amazing lifespan and they're very light at about 13 pounds per kilowatt hour what I did is I got a really good deal online on secondhand NMC or lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide batteries they're out of a ship contain a robotic truck that they use at ports and stuff I paid about $250 per kilowatt-hour they very good lifespan about 10,000 plus cycles maybe they're very light not quite as light as lipo but 16 pounds per kilowatt-hour and I bought 22.5 kilowatt hours to start off the battery bank for me that's a good amount to just get started on I think if I make this world cruising boat eventually it'll be at least 100 kilowatt hours per on board from there we got to talk about the motor because that's a lot of battery in certain applications and that's really not very much battery in other applications so before we can even talk about the motor we got to talk about where we want to put the motor so we've got two options we can either go inboard or el borde an inboard motor is out of the way and it requires two motors but that may adds the cost but it also adds redundancy it allows us to do one-to-one ratio which is really nice and it gives us space enough to put pretty much any motor we want in there now in my particular application it also has a little confusion because it means I have to drill holes in my hull and thread in spots for my actual propellers to go through and my drive shafts and everything because I don't have any of that on my board right now so the other option is an outboard motor it's easily removable so you can remove the entire motor and do work on it you can turn the motor to get side thrust available in tight quarters you can either use one or two outboard motors it's good for a 1 to 2 ratio usually if you're going to use a regular engine outboard motors so they run anywhere between 1.8 to ratio or a 2 ratio the problems is is it has a smaller motor space available so some of the bigger motors won't work in there also depending on how you have it set up it's not necessarily as efficient it really depends on your boat in my particular case I have a warm boat which are designed primarily to use outboard motors and that's why I'm leaning that way although I haven't bought anything yet so that's still up in the air alright let's talk about motors there are a lot of different kinds of motor out there and for my applications I'm looking at about 30 horsepower moves my boat reasonably well so that's either 215 horsepower motors or 130 horsepower motor a 30 horsepower is roughly 22 kilowatt motor that doesn't really perfectly line up like it's not a perfect comparison electric motors are really confusing depending on the kind of electric motor you have they have like continuous draw and usage and and then they can have like these peak thrusting moments so I could have basically it's the same as having like a diesel motor that was say 15 horsepower diesel motor that could crank out 15 horsepower day in and day out but then like if you really hit the juice you could get like 35 horsepower out of it for like I don't know 90 seconds or something like that now also the torque was available instantly so for some applications the torque is more important than horsepower there's really hard to convey exactly how this motor will compare to a gas or diesel motor but I'll do my best all right so the first up is the industrial induction motor now this one's a little attractive because the industrial induction motor is cheap you they've been making them for years they run usually three-phase AC power 230 volt is kind of the average and then you can run up from there the single-phase motors tend to be smaller horsepower smaller kilowatt rating and they're not very useful for my particular application but all the stuff I've been looking at three-phase problems is very heavy and very big upside is very efficient these are 94 or 96 percent efficient often so attractive however given the size and weight I'd have to put them as inboard motors which means I have to buy two of them and when you have to buy two motors it really does drive up the price a little bit especially when you consider that you have to buy either a three-phase inverter and a VFD or a higher cost AC motor controller this system will run anywhere between 3,000 to 6,000 dollars to set up so that's just a you know kind of a fairly high price but it's only really considering the fact that I have to do two if I was on a mana hall I'd probably go this route because the high efficiency it's really easy to run in regen and you'd only have to buy one motor and given the fact that you're dealing with these bigger motors makes a lot more affordable a lot more useful now I could also put them into outboard motors if I was getting really small ones there are small ones that will fit in there but the problem is again I'm dealing with all air-cooled so that means I'd have to have it set up a kind of fan system and I'm really leaning towards water-cooled and again you're doubling up on stuff so a lot I found that the AC motor controllers they don't they don't get that cheap you know they're still like three or four hundred dollars each minimum and that's for the really cheap knockoff brand stuff I mean the nicer stuff is closer to a thousand bucks so it's an option I'm thinking about it the induction motor is certainly very attractive but I'm also looking at other stuff too one of the other ones that a lot of people use is a DC motor a brush - DC motor these are really cheap they've been proven in the application people have been using it for years this was the go-to motor for the last 15 years 20 years of any electric vehicles the problem is they're not super efficient at 85 percent roughly sometimes up to 90 percent but they're very small and they're very cheap they also tend to wear down those brushes tend to not fare up so well over a long period of time I found most of the applications are air-cooled which also given the fact that things are making contact with each other there's some where there's a lot of like debris inside the motors that builds up over time they generally run up to about 4,000 rpm they produce sparks and yeah air-cooled so not the most attractive option but given their cheap price I could get one or two motor combo for anywhere between two to four thousand with the motor controller and everything else set up and the fact that there's also a lot of other people have already done that that gives me in a confidence right now here's another option that I didn't think was an option until just recently I used to allow stuff with quadcopters I used to build my own racing quadcopters and stuff and they use DC brushless motors usually outboard they're called out runners mmm that means that the whole casing on the outside spins with fixed magnets on it and then the stator sits inside of it they also have n runner application ones as well now they've been used in RC stuff and the interesting thing is because the RC market has exploded so much the last 10 years it's really brought the price of these things down they've mass-produced these motors all over the place and now they have applications for agricultural quad copters that run really low rpm really strong big motors they have applications for paramotoring electric paramotoring and those guys run similar very big motor is a very small slower rpms compared to the quad copters that are running up to like 20,000 rpm and higher they also have water-cooled motor boat motors that are getting close to the wattage that I need to run my motors and they're already water-cooled and they're very small and efficient and lastly they also have ones for a small ATVs golf carts and especially go-karts so these are racing type motors and they are right around that kind of range anywhere between 15 to 20 kilowatts they're 92% efficient give or take they run anywhere between 3,000 to well over 20,000 rpm you can get water-cooled ones fairly easily and they're very very small and light like these guys are tiny compared to the induction motors it's just a whole other ballgame the induction motor is I'm looking at like the smallest ones are like 2 foot by a foot by foot and they weigh like you know well over a hundred pounds probably 200 pounds these DC ones are like the size of a melon or smaller they're tiny and they also have very modern tech because this is very new and upcoming like system so it's very attractive but hasn't been used in this application very much before the benefits is because they're being purchased so widely by di wires all over the place there's a much higher market for it much easier to get them I like the idea of a much lighter weight system and yeah I'm looking at it so maybe a couple of those in either one or two outboard motors they're also very cheap the bus those ones they brought the price way way down and if I go with that smaller motors I put two of them and two out boards which I can probably get for merely Friedan legs anyways it really does bring the price down I can get water-cooled es C's for them with say electronic speed controllers and I can also get water cooled motors themselves so let's talk about charging all that battery and all that motor is real great but if you can only run it once then it's not really worth it you got to be able to charge it over and over and over again that's when it really starts to shine now in order to effectively charge a system of that size you need a lot of charging potential most people will plug it into a dock somewhere or run a generator I'm not so keen on that I'd rather a system that's constantly charging system I don't have to think about a worry about system that's quiet that's a really big one and you know that doesn't use fossil fuels so I never have to go back to shore and reload on fossil fuels the big goal for me is to be able to just have water and electricity and power and movement for my boat without ever having to haul stuff from shore to do it so what did I get well I bought 20 solar panels which for a sailboat is a lot of freaking solar panels and they're not small ones they told us about four hundred and thirty square feet which is bigger than the apartment I lived in before I got in a van life and it's about four times the size of the square footage of my van so it's a lot of space but I get with that I get six thousand six hundred watts of brand new solar panels I got a really good deal on those guys through my buddy Sam which you've seen on the channel before he'll be helping me with that set up he also scored me a hundred amp MPPT solar charge controller which at 48 volts giving me at maximum charging voltage exactly 6600 watts currently I have one wind turbine which you guys have already seen I'm looking at buying at least one more maybe two more and that's basically for those days where we're getting wind at night getting a nice trickle charge in enough to slowly bring the motor back up you know or if we get a lot of cloudy days back-to-back it helps compensate during storms and other applications where you want to sit around and use your house and your power given the fact that we're not using fossil fuels on board at all I want to make sure that I can I can always generate electricity no matter what that is the power system now the last thing I want to talk about is my power organization and why I've kind of like leaning certain ways with certain things I'd like to water cool everything I can for me it's an energy waste to just pump heat off into the air and let it escape I would rather conserve all the heat that my electronics were producing and pump it into my water tank I'd like my fresh water tank to always be a warm freshwater tank so any drinking water we would keep the side being the cooler or something like that and then all the taps would just run warm all the time so that means I'd be water cooling the motor the motor controller the inverter the battery banks are all water-cooled all you know I'll be water cooling the fridge runs on a water cooler system as well yeah just a lot of different items probably even an air conditioner eventually we'll be running on a water cooling system all of that will pump that heat and hot water back into the water tank and keep the water tank at a nice warm temperature hopefully warm enough that we can just have a warm shower with it you know that'd be nice my battery bank is already set up in a 12s configuration which is nearly 48 volts I can change it over to a 13s configuration fairly easily I'm looking at that but it really depends on the kind of motor I get if I'm looking at motors that are set up typically for 48 volt then I would go for the 13's config if I'm looking at the DC brushless applications they have lot of motors that are specifically set up for 12s configurations so I would keep them as 12s if that were the case because I'm running lithium based batteries in series if you run them and you unbalance them then there is a potential for explosion or at least damaging the cells so that's something you want to make sure that you avoid so I'll have redundant systems of battery monitoring systems to ensure that the battery is always running in the right voltage and it's nice and safe lastly I want to talk a little bit about the inverter I haven't bought an inverter yet I need at least 4,000 watts of pure sine-wave and that's a pretty expensive inverter I'm looking at certain inverters that include chargers as well so that if I want to run an emergency generator which I do I don't have to buy a purely DC generator it's in order to get the high amperage charge that I'm looking for so with a 4000 watt pure sine wave inverter charger combo I probably get a charger that you know can charge back nearly 4,000 watts some of them three thousand two thousand watts of charge so I would just be looking for a generator that does roughly that maybe a little bit more and enabled me to maybe plug something else in at the same time for emergency applications again safety is a very big concern of mine and blue water vessel so yeah the idea what this is you have a lot of redundancy and a lot of self sufficiency that's really the big goals you can make a nice safe blue water vessel that can support yourself like on a desert island if you want indefinitely so long as you can keep collecting the food you can make water power all that stuff and just motor along to you know and the fact that I'm building all of this myself means I can cut it up later on and do whatever I want with it and I always know how to repair it so that that's a very big plus for me so yeah that is the plan for my electrical system I haven't bought a motor motor controllers or any of that yet all I have is batteries and a charging system I don't have an inverter I mean there's so many electronics still to sort out but we're getting there we're getting so I'm very excited for the system partly because of how green it is but also because of just how self-sufficient it is like I said I'm very excited to not have to haul stuff from shore to keep my life afloat and keep my life going and I like the idea of being out in the middle of Pacific and just getting boatloads of sunshine and just going and sitting in a dull drum and instead of sitting in adult room for two weeks I could just motor because I'm making fuel as I'm sitting there in the sunshine so I could still motor eight hours a day if I want to and so yeah that would be very attractive basically at the current system the way it's going to be set up I'll get about three hours at four knots of Motoring three to four hours and then with electric motor is the higher you ramp that up the more electricity burn and in an exponential rate so if you're only going one not it's gonna be very efficient I mean you can motor for a really long time but if you want to go four knots you're gonna get less distance because it brings it down if you want to go eight knots it's possible but it's gonna bring that range down great so yeah that's the system as it stands with the current battery bank I'll be controlling that eventually so I mean just take that number and times it by by four and you'll see what I what I'm pretty much aiming at for my end goal with this boat is to have a hundred kilowatt hour is on board like a Tesla car and that would give me over eight hours of motoring at four knots and you know you'd be able to motor overnight that's basically the idea so yeah that's it that's all I wanted to talk about if you guys got questions I'll do my best to answer them in the comments I understand a lot of you guys are older guys and you love your diesel and that's cool but I'm trying to break a few new boundaries with this and just what I'm thinking it's gonna be a big one gonna be a scary one and it's very complicated to wrap my head around it and it overwhelms me all the time but I think when it's built it's gonna be one amazing amazing boat and I'm very excited for that so take three-sport thanks for watching and I hope this brings you guys up to speed q

Channel: Finding Simon

Views: 156,279

Keywords: Finding Simon, sailboat, Sailboat Build, Wharram, Catamaran, Oro 47, Plywood Sailboat, Sink or Swim, Gabriola Island, British Columbia, Canada, Canadian, Sailor

Id: bMXR1UYSMa4

Length: 19min 46sec (1186 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 01 2018