The gentle thunder of electricity

So I mentioned that our solar panel was doing nicely keeping up with our boat battery needs, all of which are low-draw DC devices, but when it comes to getting work done, we rely on our computers... AC power required. I've never seen the point of using inverters to go from DC to AC for that purpose except in emergencies or if there is a surplus of power otherwise being generated by the system beyond what the battery bank or other draws require. It's just too inefficient to convert DC to AC, and when you are already operating in a low-margin system, that twenty percent or so loss can make it flat-out unsustainable.

Our laptops all run on DC current, and for the small Eee PC I use, it was easy enough to find a DC power adapter that plugs into it directly to use instead of the manufacturer's wall wart. I can charge it off the house battery system, with the engine or solar panel easily keeping up with the low draw it has. I've had more trouble finding direct DC chargers for our larger Apple laptops, though. There isn't quite the ecosystem of equipment providers as there are with PC laptops, and the chargers I have found all seem of dubious quality. The systems also draw quite a bit more than the Eee... enough that even with the solar panel at maximum efficiency, it wouldn't keep up with our working needs, to say nothing of our occasional entertainment uses.

Our alternative to date had been extra battery packs and intervals spent in marinas charging them up, then carefully shepherding them while we are out away from civilization. This year, though, we expected to spend a lot more time out, and didn't relish paying for marinas so frequently or having to dash back to civilization, so I broke down and brought my little Yamaha 1KW generator aboard.

We're not big generator fans, a stance borne of too many evenings/early mornings sitting in anchorages next to powerboats with big gensets and no compunctions about using them at odd hours. They're noisy and smelly, and we didn't really want to be the ones to inflict such disruption on our neighbors.

The Yamaha has a "quiet" mode it can use with low-draw applications, which keeps it down near fifty decibels, which I am told is conversation level. With it out roaring away in the cockpit, it seems a lot louder than any conversations I regularly have. But I hope that the combination of putting it down in the cockpit below the bench level and running it in quiet mode keeps it from being too obtrusive. It has a twelve hour runtime on one tank of gas (about half a gallon) but we'll only use it a couple hours at a time. And, if I have my way, we'll only do it when we're in an anchorage alone, or as today, we're far out on the periphery of a very large, already quite noisy harbor like Ganges. If our neighbors can hear us at all over the roar of floatplanes coming in every five minutes or runabouts screaming past, I would be very surprised.

So far it's working pretty well. I think that Mandy, with her noise-canceling headphones one, is getting the better part of the deal, though.