LIVING ON A 100% SOLAR POWERED YACHT (full tour)

we have spent the last two days living on this incredible solar powered yacht oh it looks so good but before we share the entire experience with you and give you a full tour let me quickly catch you up to speed on how we got here a year ago i fired off a crazy email that i'd never expected a response to it was the spring of 2020 like that 2020. we were living in a hotel in singapore trying to figure out what we were gonna do with a travel youtube channel during a global pandemic we had a lot of crazy ideas from biking across the u.s on like actual bicycles with pedals to buying a boat and circumnavigating the globe we must have been watching too much sailing la vagabond at the time one day while i was dreaming about sailing around the world i fell down this rabbit hole on the internet where i discovered this beautiful yacht that was completely powered by the sun i was feeling a little crazy that day so i fired off an email to the company that said something along the lines of any chance you have an extra yacht that you'd like to lend to us for us to circumnavigate the globe and make a series about it on our youtube channel to my surprise we actually received a response unsurprisingly they did not say yes it was more something along the lines of yeah we don't have an extra yacht just sitting around that you can have but once international travel is a thing again we would love to have you on board one of our silent yachts long story short we've kept in touch with the team for over a year now and what started as a crazy email during desperate times eventually led to this so now that you hopefully have a better appreciation for how we ended up here let's start back from the beginning welcome on the boat please have a look thank you this is michael and hiki they're the founders of silent yachts and after living on the water for over 20 years in 2004 they set out to build their first solar-powered yacht and that project eventually turned into silent yachts and this is tinker our mascot i have looked at this boat on my phone a million times so to be standing here it's like surreal the main reason why we started to develop power yachts was as the yacht we were searching for was not existing this is the cockpit where we usually have breakfast lunch and dinner please follow me look at this water [Music] i love this as you can see in the front part we have two trampolines uh that invite you to sit down and have a rest i think i could get used to this okay moving on up we go this is incredible uh actually driving is not so exciting on a boat like this it's it's it's really relaxing it's not about speed it's about um deceleration about relaxing and chilling i feel like all of the screens here look a lot like a tesla there could be any tension behind yes wow look at these solar panels a little bit bigger setup than our van okay that's right there we go all right let me give you a full tour of our new solar powered home for the next two nights starting with i need to learn my bow terms what is this part galley what's the back the galley starting with the galley we have a full kitchen a stove a fully functioning freezer and refrigerator keep in mind all of this is powered by the sun we have a sink with running water a very fancy coffee right there an induction stove and a dishwasher on a boat yacht moving into the saloon we have this indoor dining area indoor driving area but these are all plan b in case the weather's bad and we can't do those things on time here the master cabin here in another cabin another vip cabin on the port side we have two cabins one crew and one guest which one are we staying in [Music] i'm honored oh my gosh the entire front of the yacht is our bedroom we have tons of storage closets and drawers everywhere oh it's really good you're gonna have to drag me off this thing there's a giant tv and downstairs is the bathroom ow it has its own hot water heater so you have a good long hot shower we have this beautiful bamboo sink more storage behind the mirrors storage underneath the sink underneath this bench storage everywhere what's in here what's the one thing to say for the bathroom is it a real toilet of course that flushes and everything there's water in here and moving on to the next bedroom here on the port side right hika thank you for the help we have two more bedrooms wow these rooms are huge every bedroom has its own toilet sink and shower with hot water we also have more storage another closet and another huge comfy bed for some reason i felt like we were going to be comparing this experience to our van which saying that out loud sounds silly now but it's more like comparing it to a house from the outside you would never know all of this was down here this is something i don't think i would appreciate if i hadn't lived in a van for so long everything that's a wall can open and you can put stuff in it do you know how big of a deal that is is this storage yes see moving into the third bedroom more storage another fully functioning bathroom toilet sink shower i'm not gonna open that that looks important we've been told this is where the crew sleeps i would happily sign up to be crew if it meant that i could stay here put me to work there is a fourth and final bedroom on the starboard side they call this one the vip bedroom it's pretty much the same size as the master this is a boat very leaf on and you have to have space yeah yeah and this giant bathroom the shower is twice the size as the hotel we just came from and it's all powered by the sun no way a washer and a dryer that is insane how did you prove to people that a solar powered boat could work uh by simply doing it we built the boat even though uh especially engineers told us uh that it is not possible what we are doing there was no other way than to prove uh that it's possible cheers enjoy your day yes cheers thank you for having us on board this is uh solar wave silent 64. and this boat crossed the atlantic ocean in 2018 it was in fact the first production boat ever that crossed the atlantic ocean or any ocean electrically powered by a solar energy so we don't use the steering wheel anymore we have autopilot and this power steering system so actually this is the last boat with the steering wheel or all the others don't have steering wheels anymore it's simply outdated the steering wheel is outdated or words that i never expected to hear who needs it can we take a minute to appreciate that not only are we on one of the coolest boats in the world but just look at where we are my orca is absolutely beautiful just loving life out here this is truly like being on a tesla in the water we just pulled out a fort and i never even heard the engine start it is completely silent only thing you can hear is the water hitting the boat i don't know if i've ever been this happy in my entire life how about eating carbonara okay eating carbonara in rome was different this is just like pure joy with no other emotions attached to it the craziest thing is when we got on a plane in nashville our only plan was to go to italy and here we are karen nate 3.0 might be boat life hi neighbors we have just dropped anchor in santa pon so the water is incredibly clear and we're about to go for a swim so this is now 100 have some fun so you're gonna start me at 100 of course this is uh i never tested before battery-powered toy good luck is it working wow moving so fast wow i just made a lap around the boat in about two seconds so when you get out of the water and you want to wash the salt off all you have to do is open this secret compartment all this pipe turn it into hot or cold oh i didn't have it on take a little shower now i'm gonna go dry off on the trampoline [Music] oops so mark and haika are cooking dinner for us and i just want to re-emphasize that everything on this boat is being powered by the batteries that are below deck including the oven that was just used to cook whatever this beautiful dish is and this induction cooktop is this a coconut cream yeah did nate tell you that this is like one of my favorite things yeah he told me like you like thai food as if this day could not get any better we are having a thai curry i feel like i'm in a dream place number two is i would say the myorgan version of korean bbq my york and barbecue is so good dinner was incredible but i think what impressed me the most was the fact that we left that grill on for an hour heat pulls so much power i also ate for a full hour i would have no appreciation for this experience if we hadn't spent the last year living in a van that had solar panels on top and the fact that the electrical broke on a weekly basis and i had to get really intimately familiar with the whole system we are able to boil one kettle of water a day for coffee if we have two kettles of coffee per day and we don't drive anywhere and we're only using solar we're running the batteries down to 50 where they don't like to be i didn't think it was possible to power this much stuff with solar and not only are we powering all the appliances on the boat but the boat is being driven with an electric drivetrain there is no diesel on this boat except a backup generator that doesn't get used and check this out after everything we've done today we're still at 78 power first day on the sileon is complete this channel has given us the opportunity to do some really cool stuff the last five and a half years and i just want to make it known that we are not taking a single moment of this for granted i can feel it's moving a tiny bit which i kind of love can we buy one [Music] don't waste a minute of it this is the difference between me and nate in the mornings what's the batter wow the water's beautiful this morning this is one of those things that if i lived on this boat full time i'd like to think that i'd do every morning but i know that's probably not reality it's kind of like in the van when i thought i'd set up our chairs outside and just enjoy the view with a cup of coffee every morning done that once [Music] oh so wow this looks kind of like a green screen so yesterday we gave you a surface level tour of the living quarters of the yacht but this morning i want to nerd out for a few minutes and have michael give us a technical tour to better understand what it takes to power a yacht that's completely self-sufficient using only the sun [Music] so it goes all the way across yes we have two times 14 batteries with a total capacity of kilowatt hours on the current boats we started 200 kilowatt hours so how many kilowatt hours are in a tesla 100 so this is two teslas yes i'm trying to figure out how many of these we have in our van like maybe one we generate the power with the sun and store it in the batteries and with from the batteries it goes to either two big inverters that transform it to 230 volt ac for all household appliances also to recharge the tender and many other things and right below you another four batteries for the 24 volt system the entire floor that we're standing on right now is all batteries 2 000 pounds of batteries on this boat wow that's so organized so this is the water maker this single unit produces about 100 liters per hour we have here also the air conditioning this here is the inverter the big one has 50 000 watts wow so the inverter that is running this yacht is 25 times bigger than the inverter that we have in our van which is another reason we don't have ac this one we use more or less for the night when we have uh very little consumption or when nobody is on board so to put that in perspective that's a 3 000 watt inverter which is about the biggest you would see in a van and that's like pretty much the backup inverter here on the boat one other thing i should point out before leaving this area is that the motor on the tinder is also electric and it's powered by the house batteries on the boat so the power for everything you see except for the jet ski is coming from the solar panels on the roof but i'm told that soon they should have an electric jet ski how did you know how to make your first boat i learned by doing i made a lot of mistakes i paid for my mistakes and in the end i found out what is the right way nike did you think it was possible or did you think he was crazy no no no it couldn't couldn't work when i think it's not possible yeah they have to do this together may introduce the solar panels we have some in the back and we also have panels on the roof and how much on this boat uh 30 of this kind once again one of these solar panels has peak power of 350 watts we have three solar panels on top of our van that have peak power all together of 300 watts so about 50 times more solar on this boat than we have on our van the motors are in the hull i will show it to you oh under the bed so this is one of the electric motors this has 160 kilowatt this is actually our smallest model okay vanna white all is by the way ip68 that means it can work fully submerged okay so now the remaining question is what happens if it's cloudy we simply continue to run the air conditioning like today with open doors we're not conserving energy or we can still go on cruising if it's cloudy of course yes the energy harvesting would be would be reduced of course but still the energy would come in and we can still refill our batteries or continue to cruise and this is the the in my opinion the the main difference main advantage compared to a sailing boat that you can use the power that you harvested yesterday or last week you can use it today or tomorrow what if you're in the middle of the ocean and it's cloudy for one week we start the generator it's a diesel generator yes i frankly admit yes we have diesel on board but it's it's a kind of safety i i would not forgo even after running the air conditioning all night we've had the doors open all morning the air conditioning is still running the batteries are still at 55 okay and that concludes our tour from the elon musk of the seas you just loving life tinker has lived on a boat her entire life and she's 11 years old and she still looks like a little puppy so much okay captain can i drive the boat of course you can detonate of course this is your steering wheel we are in the auto mode that means in that setting you control the heading that means we are now driving at 150 degrees you can correct it by turning this wheel to put this in perspective this boat is steered with a tiny knob basically the size of the knob that you would change the volume of your radio with in your car and this controls the speed yes can i speed up just a little bit and that's all there is to it yeah that's it what are the thrusters that move the boat sidewards but only when the boat is stopped in the marina for maneuvering we have our thrusters in the middle that means we push the boat that way to turn the boat we have the two throttles if you put them that way yeah yeah it turns the boat immediately you can try if you want to i can do this yes all right let's see what happens okay now you go to backwards and you end up in the 360. let's go around again how would you like nate's driving yes the rest of the crew board is wondering what's happening right now it all seems very simple it is simple uh as we have no enemies around us yes we're on open water good job nate all right we've just arrived at our second anchorage in a place called magaluf beach it is absolutely stunning just like everywhere else we've seen here in mallorca but uh thankfully michael took back over as the captain before we parked because the last thing i want to do is run this boat into our neighbor's boat that looks like this although that would probably make for a pretty interesting youtube video i crashed the mega yacht into another mega yacht [Music] [Music] lunch is beautiful as usual this pink dot that you can see is ayolichi botlet and this brown color is chocolate wow that's amazing can you taste the chocolate a little tiny bit but if you hadn't told me i don't think i would taste the chocolate so good never had anything like it compliments to the chef thank you this is ready i'm still so impressed by how much space this yacht has specifically the outdoor seating options they feel endless i could sit here here or here or here they probably shouldn't let me sit here here here here here or here you've definitely seen here if i want to watch the chef cook i click here and this is where i will be spending the rest of the afternoon so at night the roof of the fly bridge can actually be lowered down by hydraulics so why are we putting this down less windage uh nothing gets wet or dirty or salty and once that top flybridge is down it almost makes the silent yacht look even more sleek this is the first time i've been able to appreciate just how many solar panels are on the roof i can't believe this is our last night on board it's all gone by way too quickly [Music] you can still catch it come on wow it's too early but that's so pretty this is a historic moment cara is out of bed without coffee it's coming up so fast you've never seen a sudden rats before i wanted to make the most of our last morning it sounded like a great idea last night that was my idea here we go i found coffee thank you the morning is complete thanks for getting up with me it was weird unfortunately all good things must come to an end i think what surprised me most about this trip is how little we've had to sacrifice because all the power for the boat is coming from the sun i knew coming into this that the yacht had air conditioning but i honestly thought it was going to be one of those things where it was like yeah technically it has air conditioning but we should probably only use it for a couple hours a day because we can only generate so much power or i thought when we got on board there was going to be a big lecture about turning all the lights off so we didn't run out of power but there was none of that it was almost the opposite i almost felt less guilty about leaving the lights on because the energy is just constantly being pulled back into the boat and it's free and it's renewable my expectations for this trip because i've been looking forward to it for so long were up here and that's a dangerous place for your expectations to be sometimes but this trip did not disappoint this yacht did not disappoint in any way no no no no no no no goodbye ciao is there anything else you would like people to know about silent yacht you have to see silent yet you feel silent yet and you have to enjoy silent yachts we're doing our best here but you just have to come to experience it this is the port side this is the i don't think i've ever known that yeah that's why we did a circle it was not intentional do you make a new seasick i'm good

Channel: Kara and Nate

Views: 2,391,157

Keywords: solar boat, electric boat, silent yachts, solar catamaran, yacht tour, luxury yacht, electric yacht, solar powered yacht, off grid, living on a boat, boat life, boat tour, yacht walkthrough, yachts for sale, solar yacht, silent 55, la vagabonde, silent yacht, yacht charter, power yacht, live aboard, off grid living, house boat, solar power, solar energy, liveaboard couple, super yacht tour, electric boats 2021, electric boat build, electric boat general dynamics

Id: iIte4FNI0U0

Length: 22min 35sec (1355 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 25 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/lyskamm88]

They are falling behind: this video is quite old (I guess 1 month). I suppose it was planned since they went in a sort of US wild adventure with no internet, so they needed the time to be back and upload the video. Back to cycling now, in Iowa, so videos should be more up to date.

[u/reliableotter]

They are good infomercial hosts. This wasn't my favorite video though. I think I lean more towards things that are less luxury goods.

[u/ryannnss]

This video really could’ve benefitted from them vlogging more rather than just showing the boat. Even if they added in the flight from Switzerland, grabbing airport coffee, getting to the boat in Mallorca or whatever, that was always what made their videos.

[u/Asiakilledbourdain]

If they depart Mallorca without a video of the island itself...................you now know where their priorities lie.

TBH, this video was f-ing pointless. 99.9% of viewers will never consider a purchase like this and this company does not even produce charters. If they did, it would be thousands of dollars per day, something 98% of their followers could not afford. Oh, and Kara, so surprised to get the main cabin? Your luggage was already placed there prior to filming the scene.

[u/bd07bd07]

I can't believe that even someone who is as overconfident and entitled as Nate actually sent this company an email saying, "Any chance you want to lend us one of these yachts so we can document a solar powered circumnavigation of the globe".

[u/Jamie___May]

I have never heard of this brand before, but man, those are some incredibly low prices for what you’re getting, if Google is correct.

[u/cargalmn]

I'm not a huge critic of most of their videos. I didn't mind Interlaken, though they should have spent another day - at least! - there to actually SEE that part of Switzerland, which is more stunning in person than any videos show. That said, this video finally grated on me. The dramatic responses are overblown and driving me crazy.

My husband and I have started a travel channel - we don't aspire to become K&N; we just want to share our travels with friends and family. I've literally told him, you know I can't be enthusiastic like Kara, right? We've talked about energy levels on our favorite channels - Tim & Finn, Gone with the Wynns, Less Junk More Journey, K&N (their earlier stuff), etc...it's actually kinda interesting.

On K&N, you have someone who has high highs and low lows (not many). On Tim & Finn, Finn is closer to a level baseline of emotions but still has highs and lows (just not nearly as dramatic). The Wynns and Less Junk both stay closer to a level baseline - mostly upbeat, even when things don't go their way, and not overly dramatic but appreciative about the positives.

Since we started our own channel, we really started paying attention (were more like Less Junk and the Wynns) to other videos - and that's caused the dramatics to grate on me more than usual, I think. I really hope they start intl travel again.

Ps, since I'm writing a novel - I am VERY curious about their time in MN since they went to the boundary waters. I've been there more than once and it's no joke. You portage everything you bring (we pack incredibly light), and there was a fire ban while they were up there (there still is). Toilets are holes in the ground. 😄

[u/alvarkresh]

By the way, is it just me or did the audio completely cut out for this video?

[ EDIT: I checked back later and the sound was fine, so Youtube oddness I expect. ]