Cruising Boat Electrical System Design, Part 2—Thinking About Systems

Published Jan 19, 2019 11 comments Updated March 5, 2020

In the last chapter we thought about what our electrical consumption was going to be and (hopefully) wrote those numbers down for both sailing offshore and at anchor.

Next we need to add in any other big loads that I did not deal with in the last chapter. Two that come to mind are 12/24 volt DC watermakers and furnace type heaters like those from Eberspächer (Espar) and Webasco.

(If you are wondering why I didn't mention these two before, the reason is highly technical...I forgot. Sorry).

That said, my senior moment is actually a good thing, because watermakers give us another chance to think about smart management of all loads, so that we can build an electrical system that does the job of supporting happy and comfortable cruising without requiring a really silly number of batteries.

Let's look at that:

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Book Chapter Navigation:

<< Cruising Boat Electrical System Design, Part 1—Loads and Conservation

Cruising Boat Electrical System Design, Part 3—Specifying Optimal Battery Bank Size >>

Meet the Author

John

John was born and brought up in Bermuda and started sailing as a child, racing locally and offshore before turning to cruising. He has sailed over 100,000 miles, most of it on his McCurdy & Rhodes 56, Morgan's Cloud, including eight ocean races to Bermuda, culminating in winning his class twice in the Newport Bermuda Race. He has skippered a series of voyages in the North Atlantic, the majority of which have been to the high latitudes. John has been helping others go voyaging by sharing his experience for twenty years, first in yachting magazines and, for the last 12 years, as co-editor/publisher of AAC.

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