How Much Does Solar Cost? Solar Panels For Sailboats, For Dummies! Ep 269 – Lady K Sailing

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How much does solar cost for your sailboat??
This week we’re diving into how to put solar panels on your sailboat. Which solar panels to use, how many watts of solar your boat will need, and most importantly, what other sailboats are using in solar panels and charge controllers as well as battery technology for boats including golf cart batteries, AGM, and Lithium batteries. We’re making solar on a sailboat easy! Join us by subscribing!

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Getting solar panels for your boat is like ordering food in Italy you know you want to eat but you don’t want to have to learn Italian which is a beautiful language but just to order a meal once so why learn the entire language of solar panels watts and amps amp hours

Watt hours voltage mppt just to get some on your boat if only there were a way to just get whatever someone else has already figured out that works the same for your boat Before we get started we just dropped two new episodes on the Practical Sailor channel one on starlink and how to make it better and one on the Island packet 370 I’ll leave links below if you want to check them out we’ve gone down the rabbit hole in past videos on measuring

How much electricity your boat uses in a 24-hour period mine uses 180 amp hours for example and then selecting a battery Bank based on that usage and then selecting and building out a solar rig to match all that information and it’s a very deep Rabbit Hole today we’re not

Going to do that today we’re going to work from a different direction and make it as easy as possible we’re just going to assume we want as much solar as we can fit on our boat reasonably what is everyone else using that has already learned Italian and what’s working out

There in the real world today we don’t need another Tony Soprano in our house a brief interlude for a second if I may you guys said it was okay to rant here and have a little bit of a rant today I’m going to answer some commonly asked questions from the comment section on

This channel question one Tim are you ever going to sail South again you loser yes when my daughter goes off to college in a couple years question two how is this a sailing ch this guy never Sails this isn’t a sailing Channel if you want bikini girls on white sandy beaches go

Watch something else this is a get more people sailing more easily Channel a celebrate sailing Channel a buy a sailboat sailing Channel this is a help other people join us in this awesome sport of ours no matter what the haters say sailing Channel Kati this is your

Night don’t let the hater stop you from doing your thing this is a channel on a mission to share Fair sailing to remove The Gatekeepers and naysayers that would hoard sailing all to themselves the know- it alls and the rich old men that tell you you can’t do this thing because

You can and you’re going to question three this guy sailed to the Bahamas once and thinks he’s an expert okay that wasn’t a question it was just a sort of character assassinating comment meant to boost somebody’s ego in some sort of childish tantrum and that’s okay dude

Express Yourself sir while you saw me sail to the Bahamas once on YouTube thanks for watching by the way I’m no expert yes I’ve acquired a bunch of knowledge but I’m still learning I race in multiple leagues multiple nights a week because I want to learn more I’m

Always saying that the first 75% of sailing is actually pretty easy anyone can learn to make a sailboat go in generally the direction that they want it’s the efficiency that last 25% of sailing that takes decades to figure out that’s what I’m working on in my quest

For knowledge I own three sailboats and I use all of them often I sail and race all over North America I make this Channel and dive into the history of sailboat design and construction I take questions and consult with people every day on the subject of sailing and

Sailing boats I use my cl14 to teach kids how to sail am I an expert absolutely not I’ve acquired some knowledge and I’m going to share it because I love sailing I love helping people the do I have something to offer the sailing world in my own small and

Humble way I think so at least I’m trying and again thanks for watching okay that garbage out of the way solar usually we work from a how much power do you need perspective but instead here’s what people actually use in sort of three by size options for you to choose

From I’m going to use the same solar panel in all three options to keep it super simple it’s an easy to find well-made long-lasting 3 140 W panel from Canadian Solar these guys have been around for ages and even delos used Canadian Solar Panels for a while if you

Have minimal needs lights radio Auto Helm basically everything short of a freezer one of these bad boys will do you just fine and it’s 5′ 3 and 1/4 by almost 3 and 1/2 ft wide so you can hang it off the back of your boat mount it

Over the cockpit easy peasy this panel kicks out 340 WTS so it’ll charge your 12vt deep cycle battery let’s use this one from West Marine at just shy of 30 amps every hour you likely already have a 30 amp battery charger that you use at the dock so basically this solar panel

Will do the same thing that charger will except it’ll do it while you’re not at the dock this battery we’re looking at is 80 amp hours and it’s AGM so about 80% of it is usable so you really get about 60 amp hours this solar panel will

Recharge that battery fully in about 2 hours of good Sun in between the solar panel and the battery you need a charge controller that’ll handle this 340 W panel and 30 amps of charge that it’s going to kick out so the vicron 100/30 is a really good fit the 100 is how many

Volts it’ll take and the 30 is how many amps it’ll charge with it’s the perfect charge controller for this solar panel I found the panel for sale in Florida just as an example for about 150 bucks the batter is about 300 you can get a better

Deal if you shop around and don’t go to West Marine and the charge controllers $150 total $600 and you’re off grid entirely assuming that you don’t need that freezer throw in 1,000 watt inverter and you’re golden in good Sun for let’s say 5 hours a day this rig

Will give you about 150 amp hours a day you can use my boat needs about 180 so this wouldn’t be enough for me so what if you want a freezer or just weigh more power option two this is still good if you have like a 35 ft monel

But you’ll have to frame it in up as a bimin or something which doubles as a nice sun shade and in my case triples as a rainwater collection system two of that solar panel 340 WT * 2 is 680 Watts now we’re cooking with sunshine and

Remember the size of these panels two of them side by side will be just over 6 and 1/2 ft wide the same width as most monoh Hol cockpits conveniently and almost 6 ft long total charge now jumps up towards 60 amps every hour of sunshine so we’ll jump to a victron

150/60 and because we have so much more charge coming in we can store a lot more energy let’s grab a pair of these group 31s 105 amp hour at about 80% so 170 usable amp hours total cost 300 for panels 350 for the charge controller and about 900 in batteries we’re cruising in

At around 1,500 bucks but now we can run the freezer throwing a 2,000 w mod inverter and you can run the power tools whenever you want to this is a fairly similar setup to what I have and use all the time as long as it doesn’t get

Cloudy for more than a few days it works for me 680 watts would work for most people and plenty for most Lifestyles this is ideal if you’ll be on a monoh hul with a single fridge and a single freezer and laptops charging all the time you’ll be able to watch movies at

Night and fall asleep letting the movie continue to play not worrying about leaving everything on the batteries will be full again by noon anyway the mission here at Lady K sailing has always been to get more people sailing more easily and I couldn’t do it without your help a

Big shout out to the patrons people who give a couple of bucks an episode to make this all possible thank you if you’d like to help out please consider becoming a patron option three we’re going to get ridiculous now and behind this episode there is a reason for this

Exercise I’m building out a solar system right now for a different purpose not a boat solar system but all the same principles apply and on this build it’s going to be go big or go home a full-on mobile office unlimited power sort of let’s talk about 400 watt panels $250 a

Pop almost 6 ft by 4T and let’s do four of them 12 ft by 8 ft of panels totaling 1,600 Watts that’s 1,000 in panels and will require multiple charge controllers we’ll still be using victron 1 1560s but two of them for these panels so we’ll need two controllers that’s

$700 in good sun say in Florida we’ll be bringing in over 600 amp hours every day that’s almost enough to run my house in fact outside of the electric dryer and stove it is enough to run my house and we’ll need to store all that energy and

Lithium would be nice how much is that well I was talking to the guys over at battleborn a few days ago and 100 amp hours of lithium from them is running about $750 right now for this much solar I would say we need about 500 amps of

Battery to store all that power lithium is good to about 90% usable so that’ll be 450 usable for almost 4 grand in batteries so total with lithium all in with the panels and controllers about 50 $500 and we’d never need to plug in again but food for thought people still

Use golf cart batteries they’re much heavier and only good for about 5 years but if we swapped in eight Trojan t105s we’d get the same 450 usable amp hours and a total of about $2,000 cheaper so $5,500 with lithium $ 3500 with lead of course this is a four dummies approach

In this video building this will nickel and diu with connectors and some wiring and a battery monitor but this is the nuts and bolts of it the bigger question you should ask is how many panels are you comfortable fitting on your boat one might be just enough for you two is what

Most people are using four would be amazing if you can find the space like on a catamaran solar like sailing doesn’t have to be elitist or difficult or some mystery requiring you to learn Italian to understand it sometimes we call the back of the boat the back of

The boat and not the stern and that’ll piss some people off but if we aren’t pissing some people off what are we even doing a quick reminder if you want to jump on a boat and gain some experience and help somebody in the process and you’re on the East Coast or you’re on

The east coast and need help moving your boat I have a Facebook page for East Coast crew finding it’s called Lady K sailing East Coast crew finder I’ll link it in the description also go watch And subscribe to that Practical Sailor channel it’s all new we just did those

Two episodes on starlink and how to make it better on your boat and then the Island packet 370 I love you guys until next week keep the heavy side down but not too far down we’ll see You h