So, without fear or favour, some observations about what’s worked so far:

The new lithium batteries have been ace - thanks to Mark at Life Power for all the discussions leading up to the installation (and selling the batteries to us) and to Andy and Tieran at MEI for working out how to install everything. To date we’ve run absolutely everything, and some, to test them. By way of example, via our 3kw inverter, on a typical day/ morning, we twice boiled the kettle, microwaved milk for the Mocha pot and toasted bread for breakfast (which used about 5% of the available capacity), then ran the Ninja (see next para) to make bread, together with all the usual paraphernalia of the day onboard at sea and harbour - two fridges (one operating as a freezer), navigation, autopilot etc. We ended the day with 65 per cent still remaining. We recharged the batteries completely from solar, wind and hydro power. With the old lead acid batteries, I would have been able to boil a kettle and maybe used the microwave once. New batteries then - so far so good.

  
One of the reasons we changed to Lithium ‘house’ batteries was the possibility of having power, sufficient to run some level of electrical cooking appliance(s), that we could make bread, steam things, chips (obvs) and pressure cooking. There are apparently altogether 15 modes of cooking in the Ninja that we bought - we’re working our way through them. The opportunity of ‘spare’ power is making all this possible. The experiment continues. Sausage casserole, chicken kiev’s and steamed vegetables are our most recent successes; bread is the star of the show.  

Renewable power is the only reason really, that we can rely so heavily upon the Lithium batteries. Some of the gear we need to make all this all work had fitted onboard already by the previous owner. We have 800w of solar panels, a SilentWind 600 (w) generator and a Watt&Sea (600w) hydro generator. The Watt&Sea is awesome; delivers 10A into the batteries while we’re sailing at anything over 5 or 6knots; solar, when the sun shines is nearly as much but drops to 5A or less when not in direct sunlight, and wind generates about 5A maximum. But regardless of whether we’re moving or not, the power just trickles (and sometimes, rushes) in all day. If you run the engine, the 100A alternator really pushes the power in (not at 100A, but quite a lot!). The batteries, solar panels, wind and hydro generators all have fancy battery management systems with Bluetooth connections so that I can monitor in detail the various states of charge and the sources of it. A bit nerdy, and I’m reminded (often) to stop being quite so obsessed with the apps! The Chief in me ;-)

Anyway, the upshot is, that with everything running (except the engine), including autopilot, which is one of our biggest power users, together with quite large ‘cooking’ loads, we manage to balance the amps going out with the amps coming into the batteries. This has been quite a short test, over a period of a few weeks since the batteries were installed, and we began our cruise South, so I’ll revisit later to see how we’re doing over the long term.

Simon

Pictures: solar, wind, hydro, 
ninja 15in1 (glass of wine optional), Battery app.