On 11/16/10 8:54 AM, Wayne.B wrote:
On Tue, 16 Nov 2010 08:23:03 -0500, wrote:

You guys sure spend a lot of time, effort and money dealing with
'lectricity on your boats!

If you start doing any serious cruising, you will also. The old days
of using kerosene lanterns are just about over for most of us. If you
have ever experienced a power failure at your home that lasted more
than a few hours you will realize how closely dependant on electrical
power we have become.

On our boat, and many others, we can't even cook, run water or flush
the heads without electricity.


When the power goes off at the house, our standby LPG-fired generator
switches on. It's got the "juice" to run a heat pump, refrigerators,
lights, oven, but not everything else at the same time, of course. So
far, the worst we've had it was two days without outside electrical
power during the aftermath of a heavy snowstorm.

I don't see us doing the sort of "serious cruising" you and many others
here do. We're weekend and four-day weekend cruisers, at best, and if
the weather in our environs is really hot and we're going to be on the
boat overnight, I'll plug into shore power at a marina and turn the A/C
on full-blast, though our generator allegedly has the juice to run the
A/C. We also have a 3000-watt inverter which I have yet to use, other
than to try it out to see that it worked.