How Sandwitch Works

It is Monday morning October 27 and we are still here in Newport waiting for the weather to clear. As we have a lot of new gear on board we are unwilling at the moment to push it too much untill everything is tested. I thought that this might be an appropriate time to give a rundown on what we did to the boat to get it ready for extended cruising.

One of the most important things for us is renewable energy. We are going to be in places where we can't find good diesel, wont have access to a dock and will not be able to find high end mechanics to help if things get too complicated. The only two steady sources for renewable energy come from solar and wind power so we installed one wind generator and two solar panels on the Sandwitch's stern. Sandwitch did not readily have a place to install this items so we bolted in a large stainless steel frame that doubles as a lift for our dingy. The top portion of the frame, or arch, houses, from port to starboard, a wind gernerator, a solar panel, two GPS antenas, another solar panel, and a KVH Satelite phone dome. The dingy hangs bellow on two block and tackle pulleys.

Now that we have a convenient way to make energy from nature we need a good way to store it. We expanded our battery bank so that it now has 1150 amp hours of capacity. While we are underway using a normal amount of electricity we can last over 48 hours without charging. Last Friday we went sailing in 15kts of breeze with all the electronics on and the autopilot driving and we were able to actually produce more energy than we were using.

Batteries are very reliable, especially if they are well monitored, so we installed a Mastervolt 2000 watt inverter/charger/monitor. This allows us to see how much charge is being produced, how much energy is being consumed and how much power we have left. It also changes 12 volt DC into 120 volt AC so we can run our microwave, blender, and other normal household appliances.

We opted against a gernerator because it's only use would be to run our Air Conditioning and we knew that if we had it we would use it thereby consuming a ton more fuel.

In the same vain of trying to consume less electrcity we installed LED lights inside Sandwitch and also for all the running and navigation lights. Regular halogens use ten times as much electricity as LEDs therefore we now can enjoy our lights much longer without worrying about too much consumption.

As we are planning on travelling to very remote places where there may not be reliable sources of water we also installed a Spectra watermaker. This amazing device uses reverse osmosis to create perfectly drinkable water from normal seawater. Also, it runs on 12 volt dc which means that we can run it off of either our battery bank or our alternator.

Stand by for another blog about all the safety equipment we have on board and how we navigate from place to place...