Corfu / Kerkyra

Sans Peur
Grete & Fred Vithen
Sun 18 Sep 2016 12:41
39 37 47N 19 55 66E Port Mandraki, Corfu 18 September
​Port Mandraki is located in the Old Fortess of Corfu. It's a Venetian port constructed in the 15th century. 
Superb location directly under the steep walls of the fort. A short stroll away is old town of Corfu.
Nice and quiet. Only sailing boats moored here.
11-17 September we stayed on the other side of the fortress at NAOK YC. 
Cheaper, 30 E/night, but not as safe as Mandraki and today it's lousy weather, rain, thunder and strange winds.
Also we need reliable shore power to be able to check and measure our Gel Batteries. Something is not right with our
Mastervolt installation. 
A big disadvantage with this marina was all these big super motor yachts. Probably good business for the YC and the harbour master ...
but the fume and noise from all these huge generators running 24/7. Monsters!
And an endless stream of cars, taxis, limousines, tankers, suppliers ... occupying the quay.
Then this endless cleaning by the paid slaves ... water, water, water ... This ridiculous  waste with water and cleaning the same parts over and over and over again.
It gives you the creepes.
Leonidas, a local sympathy Mastervolt authorised technician has spend some hours measuring and monitoring
our Mastervolt Mass Charger 24/50 and our 4 x 140 Ah House Battery. 
Setting in charger was wrong! All originally installed in the homeland of Mastervolt, Holland!? 
So now we are running tests on our batteries. So far not so good. But more tests are needed.
Leonidas hopefully will show up on Monday.
And we discuss matters also with Mastervolt Sweden now. 
We rented a scooter, as usual. Found Lidl. But also visited the nearby Gouvia Marina and there was an Mastervolt shop.
The first one we ever saw in Greece.
So far we bought these two items. 

In the future there will be 4 power supply options on Sans Peur.
1) Shore power. The easy one if your are in a harbour with connections.
2) Altenator run by our reliable work horse, Mr Perkins.
    Apparently we have a big strong one but we will now change the charge regulator to a newer and more sophisticated (we hope) Mastervolt, Alpa Pro II,
    plus also change the isolator to one with better quality. The alternator are loading all our 3 battery banks directly. Reliable and works very well (so far).
    After 1000 hours since we left Holland, the alternator will be serviced & checked in Sicily this winter.
3) Our super expensive not so reliable new Whisper Generator. It's very powerful, 5700 watt/hour, but ... 
    And it's not working in harmony with our Mass Charger 24/50. Our charger is to small so the load is unhealthy low for the generator.
    Means Grete is vacuum cleaning, AC is on, boiling water, .... to put load on it.
    This means that in order to get this to work better we need to istall a bigger charger, Mass 24/100. That's about 3.000 Euros.
    Very, very expensive this generator stuff.
4) Solar panels. Why on earth didn't we install solar panels. In this climate with the sun up shining basically everyday from a cloudless sky at least 5 months during the sailing                          
    season in the Med. Now we learned that a 285 w panel 24 v would be sufficient for our needs. Then we need an Solar Charge Master 25A connected directly to our House 
    Battery bank. Total cost ca 500 Euros.
    This will be first priority while in Sicily to istall.