Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Day 204 We've got power!!

After another day of "boat yoga", we have power!!!  We threaded the wire from Zephyrs stern past the drive shaft.  Then past the engine and up to the cabinet that holds the water pumps where we split the two stand wire into two single strands of wire.  One went to the port side to be attached to the negative posts of the battery and one to the starboard side to be connected to the positive terminal of that bank of batteries.

I installed the two fuses for the system and made the final connection of the "diversion load" gizmo(bleeds of excess power once the batteries are charged) to the negative terminal on the starter for the engine and we were done!!!

We'd started about 10:30 and were done by 4:30 this afternoon.  But hey--guess what--NO WIND!!! It was dead clam.  Not 
even a ripple on the water.  There was nothing to make the generator go around.  

Here we were, all done and there was no way to find out if it actually worked.  The wind finally started up just after 9:30 tonight.  It works just fine though we can't seem to figure out how many amps it is actually putting out.  The voltage on the batteries goes up nicely so we know it is putting out power, we just don't know how much.  I'll be talking to Jack, the electrician tomorrow since he set up the diagram as to how to install the system.  We figure with all the time involved in installing the DuoGen, close to 40 hours, we saved ourselves almost $3,000 by doing it ourselves and that figure may be conservative.  We still don't understand how the Brits claim that it can be installed in 4 hours.

Here's an example of "boat yoga".  I'm down in the bilge area under the berth in the stern cabin.  The boards that support the mattress have been removed as well as everything we had stored down in this area.  We had almost 40 feet of wire that needed to be strung through the boat.  Holes had to be drilled and clasps installed that would support the wires through all the different compartments it had to pass through.   The actual distance that it had to transit was only about 15 feet, but with all the twists and turns, it ate through almost 35 feet of wire before we got to the batteries.

We bought our new DuoGen back in May and finally have it installed.  We had originally planned to have it put in back in early August with the help of Larry and Fred from Southeast Marine in Scappoose, Oregon.  A pair of great guys that are willing to go above the call when the situation requires it.  Knowing that we knew just about nothing of installing such a unit, they were willing to come down to Astoria to help install the unit.  How's that for service?

The weather for the past two days has been quite pleasant for November.  There was actually a good bit of Sun out today.  Now tomorrow will be back to the normal.  Rain and lots of it plus wind and lots of it too if the weather people are correct(yeah, right!).  At least with the new wind generator up, we can have some fun seeing how it performs.  We'll turn off the juice from the dock and see how she charges.  We want to take off again this Saturday for at least a week to see how independent we can be now that we have the wind generator installed.  It's just about the last thing we had been waiting for to make us ready for cruising for longer than just a few days.  With luck, we will have some sunshine to make it that much better.

We're now about 95% ready with just a few more things that still need attention but nothing that can't be handled over the next few weeks during the nice days.  Now the fun can begin and we can see what the great state of Washington has to offer cruisers like us.  Stay tuned.  The adventure is about to begin--at lease we hope so.

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