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First recorded activity by BoatBanter: Jul 2006
Posts: 50
Default liveaboards; how much power are you using?

purple_stars wrote:
All that said, yes, I ran an electrical system with nav lights, laptop,
handheld radio, handheld gps, etc, using a Honda EU1000i generator for
about a month and it worked fine. But I had to run that generator a
lot mostly because I had a very small battery bank and was using a
charger from an automobile parts store. If I would have had a charger
big enough to use all the amps the generator was capable of and a
battery bank big enough to absorb them all it would have been a good
system, but as it was it was a lot of trouble and I always spent a day
or two doing nothing but charging up devices and batteries before I
made any passage anywhere.


I regularly charge with a Honda EU1000 generator (to avoid the noise
and stink of running the engine) and found that a Lewco 40amp charger
pretty much loaded the generator to its rated 800 watt continuous duty
rating when the batteries were low. That's not a lot of charging
power, 40 amps being appropriate for about a 100 to 200ah battery bank.

Yea, 800 watts @ 12.5volts should be more like 65 amps, but transformer
based chargers are notoriously inefficient, note how hot they get when
at rated load. Although newer switching type chargers are claiming
efficiencies of about 80%, which would be more like 50 amps using an
EU1000.

 
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