ANNAPOLIS BOAT SHOW AND TELL

Back in October I found myself in Washington D.C. on the same weekend as the Annapolis Sailboat Show. Even though I never consider replacing my current boat and never feel compelled to go on any new models. I do like wandering around the tents looking at the wares and asking questions. After buying my ticket on line it was a quick forty five minute drive from D.C. to the Annapolis Navy Academy parking lot where I took the free shuttle bus to the show site. It was an unusually warm day for October so it was a little hot inside the tents:

There was not much I really needed on the boat but, I did spend a little time at the Raritan booth discussing the upcoming replacing of the head hoses and a new Macerator pump on BIANKA:

While there I did pick up a bottle of their excellent product C.P. (Cleans Potties) cleaner. That was available at a special boat show price saving me a few bucks:

Been using the product for years to clean the head area on board BIANKA. I also did a quick glance at the BETA Marine Motors on display:

I was thinking about when I visited the same booth back in 2007. It was when I was looking for a replacement of my dead diesel on board BIANKA. I seriously considered a Beta engine before my epiphany of converting my sailboat to Electric Propulsion. So glad I went with EP though instead.

I stopped by the Annapolis Hybrid Marine booth distributors of the Thoosa 9000 electric propulsion system used on my boat. I also stopped at the PropEle Electric Motors booth. To see their new EP Carry out board which I had pre-orderd a few months before.  Soon I was getting hungry and sweating from the heat. It was time to duck into the normally members only Fleet Reserve Club for lunch. The air conditioning felt good and the New England Chowder and fresh Pretzel for dipping into it hit the spot:

After lunch I checked out a few more booths like FORESPAR where I checked out their dingy davit system which I am considering installing on BIANKA at some point:

Another quick stop at the SAMPSON ROPE booth to get some information about  replacing BIANKA's aging wire life lines with some new high tech synthetic lines. After that the heat just about wiped me out and I decided to take the bus back to the car and head back to D.C. I did not get to see every booth but, got what I came for in terms of information. All and all not a bad way to spend part of the afternoon at the end of the season.

AN ELECTRIC PROPULSION UPGRADE: Part One

It's been a busy summer for me so I have not been on BIANKA as often as I was in past seasons. But, I finally got around to installing the new upgraded motor controller. This is one of advantages of electric propulsion i.e. is the ability to upgrade various components of the system. The original controller gave me eight trouble free years of operation. But, at the beginning of last season after the boat was launched I went to leave the dock and had no power from the controller. I spoke to Dave at Annapolis Hybrid
Marine about it. He mentioned there had been a few of these mysterious failures of the Navitas 400 controllers and as a result they had changed controller brands. Though the new controller they install does not fit in the same box as the older Navitas TPM 400 controllers.  So as I saw it I had several options (which is another advantage of Electric Propulsion) :

1) Was to keep the current controller box and buy a new NAVITAS TPM 400 controller to replace the dead one. This would be the cheapest remedy. But, even though the original controller gave me eight years of trouble free service there was no guarantee a replacement would do the same.

2) Buy a new box with the new upgraded Sigma controller. This would effectively give me a brand new Thoosa 9000 system. Since the controller is the heart of an EP system. Only the motor, batteries, and a few other things like the Speed control, battery charger would be original.

3) Dave at Annapolis Hybrid offered another solution. If I did not have to use max power of my current system they could fit a smaller controller in my current controller box which would save me the cost of the new controller box. I never did have to pull max amps from the controller so this would probably work for me.

After thinking about it over the winter I decided to buy the new upgraded controller and box. Even though I probably would never draw max amps from the controller I did not like worrying about limitations of using a smaller controller in the current box.  Likewise since the original Navitas controller died suddenly that would also be in the back of my mind while cruising. So buying the new upgraded Thoosa 9000 controller seems like the best way to go.

I'll be showing the installation upgrade procedure in the next Post.

THE SIMPLICITY OF ELECTRIC PROPULSION: LEMCO MOTOR

I was attracted to the idea of electric propulsion because it seemed like a cleaner and simpler system to propel the boat than the hot stinky diesel engine. It is all this and more. Even I was surprised how easy it is to maintain and upgrade which I will do in the next few weeks when I install a new controller box. Which only has a few components in it and is very simple to trouble shoot.  I know this because I have opened it up and looked inside. What I did not know was how simple that even the LEMCO motor that the controller connects to was also very simple and repairable. That is until I came across this video of a fellow who has converted a Cabin Cruiser to electric propulsion. He has had the experience of taking apart and repairing the motor and produced a video of it that I found very interesting:

ELECTRIC PROPULSION: SOME THOUGHTS ON ELECTRO SAILING: Part Two

Now that I've shown an example of how I am able to easily Electro-Sail with BIANKA when the winds fail to show up. I'll discuss the components that enable me to achieve it and some of the things I have learned in the past nine years since I converted BIANKA to Electric Propulsion.

My Thoosa 9000 EP system specifications were designed  for 20 miles at 4 knots. This was using my 8A4D AGM batteries only. I have never checked if this was the actual case nor do I want to unless it becomes necessary. BIANKA is a sailboat and I always prefer to use the sail for propulsion. Another reason to avoid trying to push the battery bank close to depletion is you decrease the amount charge cycles of the battery bank. As this chart below shows:

It's about saving the amps champs! But, that does not mean I just use the EP system to get into and out of the harbor. Which is very easy for an EP system to do. I tend to leave my home harbor for other destinations not just day sails. But, EP makes that easy to do too.

So what do I use when I feel the need to Electro Sail? I will first start out under battery power alone. I watch the XBM battery monitor to see when my battery back has dropped down to about 75% battery capacity from the 100% fully charged condition I started out with. This is about two hours after I have started motoring. As noted above this habit allows me to have more recharge cycles out of the battery over it's lifetime. This is better than depleting the bank to down say 50%. It also reduces the amount of time spent to charge the battery back up to 100%

So when the battery bank has dropped to the 75% capacity.  I fire up the Honda 2000i generator and plug in the ZIVAN NG-1 charger into it.

The ZIVAN has turned into a real workhorse and has been very reliable. When I first installed the Thoosa system back in 2008 I was concerned about what would happen if the charger went bad and could no longer charge the battery bank while on a cruise. So I bought a backup NG-1. I'm happy to say that the backup has remained in it's box for these past nine years and has never had to be put into service.  The ZIVAN also works well with the Honda 2000 generator. When I use it for Electro Sailing on BIANKA it functions as a power supply pushing out 15 amps of max current to propel the boat acting as a power supply to push the boat along. It's output is just 900 watts well within the maximum 1600 watts continuous rating of the Honda generator. As the graph below from one of my harbor tests shows that 900 watts allows me to motor BIANKA at around three knots without drawing any amps out of the battery bank:

 In fact it allows me to operated the Honda Generator in ECO mode which makes the one gallon of gas in the Honda generator last for about four hours. I have operated the ZIVAN in this full out mode for hours at a time without issue. BIANKA will move along quite nicely at this speed until the fuel runs out. Of course despite being a fairly sophisticated charger the ZIVAN does not know it is being used only has a power supply to push BIANKA along on a windless day. It thinks it is still charging a battery bank. Which brings up something one has to be on the lookout for when Electro-Sailing with this and other chargers. Because the charger never sees the battery being charged at some point it will disconnect. Thinking the battery is not charging it will timeout. It takes several hours to reach this conclusion and it is easily reset by unplugging it from the generator and plugging it back in. Then it is good to go for another several hours.
 One of the nice things about having Electric Propulsion is how easily it is to modify components of the system or change operating modes. Because the ZIVAN's output is limited to 900 watts it means I am not able to take advantage of the full 1600 watts continuous output of the Honda 2000i. So I am contemplating buying a 48 volt 1500 watt power supply to use when it looks like I will have to operate on an extended Electro-Sail mode. I expect it should move BIANKA along about 4 knots. I'll test and post about that hopefully some this upcoming season.

POSEIDON SPEAKS TO ME: Part Three

I called David at Annapolis Hybrid Marine the U.S. distributors for the Thoosa 9000 systems.  Since the Key switch did not seem to be the issue I began thinking of other things that might easily resolve the problem. One was to disconnect the B+ of the battery to hopefully reset the controller. David said that was not necessary. I then mentioned that the power contactor relay might be bad. David ask if I had a multimeter on board. Of course I did. He suggested I remove the cover to the controller box and he could guide me on making some voltage measurements. This of course means emptying out the starboard locker and squeezing my way to large frame down below in the summer heat to access the controller box. I had not had to do this in eight years of electric propulsion operation because the system was so reliable. But, now it had to be done. I then asked a question that saved me some aggravation. In preparation of my journey down below I asked how many screws hold the cover of the controller box and are they Phillips? David replied no they are Torx (star) type screws. I did not have any Tork screwdrivers on board so I would need to buy them. But, at least I had not found this out after contorting my body down below after emptying out the locker. So it was a row back to land to get a Torx screw driver set to continue trouble shooting.


At the store I had several choices of Tork tools. The first one I picked up was a compact set that folding into the handle. It looked like it would do the trick. Though something told me that maybe I had better have a backup.


So I also bought another Torx set that had a screwdriver type handle with interchangeable bits. 
 Good thing I did this because I found that with the compact folding set it was difficult to access and turn the screws at the rear of the case. Where as the set with the screw driver handle was much more secure and made it easy to turn the screw. But, even then I found the controller box was just a little too close to the battery charger case to use the handle.  I was however able to use just the Torx  bit and a pair of small vice grips to turn the screw enough to remove it.



With the controller case finally removed I gave David another call and armed with a digital multimeter I was able to start trouble shooting.  There is not much to a Thoosa 9000 system. There is of course the battery bank, motor, key switch and a box holding the controller and a few other components.

But, even inside the controller box there are many components that one finds with a diesel engine system. There is a relay, fuses, connectors. The one main different component is the motor controller. In my case it is a Navitas 400 unit. Under Davids guidance I carefully connected the multimeter ground to the B- battery connection in the box. I then checked the voltage at the power relay connections. Which was the component I thought was the next culprit after elimination the key switch. I measured 55 volts which was full battery voltage on both terminals.  David explained that it looked like the the relay was good because 55 volts on both terminals means the coil of the relay is not open. What happens on turn on is after the Controller does it's self check it grounds one side of the relay which then allows full battery power to the controller. This was not happening. So it was time to look at the controller. There were two status/fault lights on one side of the controller neither one was on. David then instructed me to probe two pins on the multipin connector  to the controller module.  There was 55 volts across those pins. This meant the controller module was getting power. So the diagnosis is the controller is bad. David mention this had happened to other units and as a result they were no longer using the Navitas controllers because of these mysterious sudden failures. Stil I had gotten eight trouble free years out of this one and could easily replace it but, I was thinking it might be best to upgrade to the new controller David mentioned. Trouble is the new controller is larger and won't fit in to the current box. He said I also needed to check if the new slightly larger box dimensions would fit in the current space. I'm pretty sure they would but, I want to make sure and while I'm at it I want to mount it so I will be able to have enough roof to use the Torx screwdriver handle to remove the cover in the future.

 So a quick ten minutes of probing and the problem was quickly diagnosed. Compared to the hours I and some diesel mechanics I had hired in the past spent scratching our heads working on the diesel it was a breeze. Unfortunately, it is getting late in the season and I would be away for several weeks. So I had a few things to think about before I decide to move ahead with a new controller box which I'll share in an upcoming post.

HARBOR TEST 2015

A few weeks ago I did another of the annual harbor tests I have been doing on BIANKA's electric propulsion system. Here is a graph of the results:

Results are similar to least years tests with no real significant differences. Here is a graph of this years data compared with the 2014 test:

Some of the other data comparisons of the tests:

 The % battery at the end of the test was 89.7% compared to 90.6% last year.

The Amp Hours used for the test was 16.5 compared to 15.2 for the 2014 test.

NOTE: Some of the increase may be due to the distance traveled for the the test. This year the distance traveled for the test was 2.2 nm while in 2014 it was 1.8 nm. The difference might be explained by the location of the buoys which are removed and replaced each year in the harbor.

The tests show that the Thoosa electric propulsion system is still preforming well. It has been eight years after I installed it.  Along with  the reduction in maintenance and cost savings it continues to reinforce the notion  that it was a good decision to convert to electric propulsion back in 2007.


PREVIOUS HARBOR TESTS
2013
2014

ELECTRIC PROPULSION HARBOR TEST 2014

I'm a little behind in posting blog  posts after being a month away from the boat working. I hope to be posting more frequently and catching up on things now that I'm back on board.  Here are the results of the 2014 harbor test of my Thoosa 9000 electric propulsion system. I did the test earlier in the season soon after launch showing the speed vs power required to move my 30 foot 16,000 lb sailboat using electric propulsion:

NOTE: Speed is in knots

Below is the 2014 test data compared with the 2013 test at the 10 to 50 amp throttle settings:

Note: To see the averaged power settings for the 2013 tests click here. The graphs show very little change in performance in me electric propulsion system from last year.

NOTES OF AN ELECTRIC SAILOR: Late summer cruise 2013

I decided to head out on a late summer/early fall cruise yesterday. Before I did I topped up the 48 volt propulsion bank for the Thoosa 9000 system using the Honda 2000i generator at the mooring. In the morning I used the helm instrumentation panel to read the battery voltages here were the readings:

BATTERY 1   13.3 VOLTS

BATTERY 2   13.1 VOLTS

BATTERY 3   13.1 VOLTS

BATTERY 4   12.8 VOLTS 

PACK VOLTAGE 53.2 VOLTS

I left later than I had planned and so had to buck some current while heading out of the harbor. Once I got out to open water I found the winds were light to nonexistent for most of the day. So I motor sailed for most of the eight hours in the light breeze drawing currents from 5 amps to 25 amps. After a trip of 18 miles I picked up a mooring in a nearby harbor and took the following readings of the batteries on the instrumentation panel:

BATTERY 1   12.6 VOLTS

BATTERY 2   12.5 VOLTS

BATTERY 3   12.4 VOLTS

BATTERY 4   12.4 VOLTS

PACK VOLTAGE 50.7 VOLTS 

The percent charge as read on the Xantrex XBM battery monitor showed a reading of 83%. I fired up the Honda 2000i generator using the 900 watt ZIVAN NG-1 battery charger until it reached the second stage of charging. I then switched to the Dual Pro 4 charger which topped up each battery individually until fully charged. It took three and a half hours to fully recharge the propulsion bank. During which time I also charged the battery for the 12 volt house bank and the Electric Paddle outboard.


BLOG UPDATE:  I was relaxing in the cockpit enjoying a glass of wine when I suddenly realized that I never took the Amp Hour readings off of the XBM battery monitor after I finished the sail. After six years I guess I'm just too comfortable with the electric propulsion system to keep an eye on all the parameters. :)  Perhaps I'll remember next time.

ELECTRO SAILING AROUND NEW YORK: Part Two: Riding the East River Flood

 The current that took BIANKA and I down the Hudson River got the boat to the Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan Island at just about the time the of the flood current up the East River. Even though I had to use the motor exclusively for the past six hours,  the quiet operation of electric propulsion made it a very pleasant journey.  This video covers the East River  part of the trip from  the Battery to just before Hell Gate.

ELECTRO SAILING AROUND NEW YORK PART ONE CLICK HERE

ELECTRO SAILING AROUND NEW YORK PART THREE CLICK HERE

EASY ELECTRIC BOAT MAINTENANCE PART TWO: SHAFT COUPLING REPLACEMENT

One of the hardest areas to work around when BIANKA had the Westerbeke diesel was the stuffing box. Because the boat had a V Drive transmission the prop shaft ran under the engine and transmission:

Trying to get two wrenches to adjust the stuffing box was not in the category of what I would call fun. There was hardly enough room to move the tools because of the tight space:

Just looking at these old pictures of the limited space and the grime gives me the shakes.  That all changed once I put in the Thoosa 9000 electric propulsion system. Now access to the stuffing box for adjustment is no longer problematic as it was with the diesel:

The area is easy to get to and open and which means there is a lot of range to use the wrenches for adjustment. Best of all it is clean!  Capt. Mike is very happy about that. As I mentioned I've gone five years without a lot of maintenance on the system including the stuffing box once the initial adjustments were done.
I think part of the reason is because there is so little vibration when using an electric motor for auxilary propulsion there is little need to adjust or replace the packing around the shaft when compared to the vibration of operating a diesel engine. But, since this is a standard stuffing box and not one of the newer Dripless Shaft Seal type stuffing boxes that does not mean they won't drip a little bit. Indeed that is what they are supposed to do to make sure the packing is lubricated and not compacted to tightly around the shaft. 


 When I purchased my electric propulsion system five years ago. I had the distributor at the time provide me with a shaft coupler to connect the motor with the prop shaft. Unfortunately, the one he provided was made of steel but, not stainless steel. Since I was new to the idea of electric propulsion I trusted his choice. Here are the couplings side by side:

 Well, five years of drips from the stuffing box had started to rust one end of the original steel shaft coupling. Now there's a saying that "rust is natures Loctite" and it may perform that function for awhile but, it won't do that forever. Which brings me to why I'm doing this maintenance sooner rather than later.

 The fact is a stainless steel coupling would have been a better choice to connect the stainless steel shafts of the motor and prop. I decided that removing the motor would allow better access to the coupling and since removing the electric motor is easy and weighs only about 45 lbs it was a no-brainer. I just removed the four screws and two bolts shown in the previous post and lifted the motor away from the bracket :

Access to work on  the rusted coupling was now even better:

I was hoping that I would be able to remove the eight bolts holding the two piece shaft coupling to the shafts easily just using a ratchet with the proper allen head bit:

But, unfortunately despite spraying the bolts with PB Blaster  over several weeks I was only able to remove four of the bolts with the ratchet.  I guess it's true that "rust is natures Locktite" after all. Oh well time to take out the Dremel Tool  and cut through the rusted bolts in the coupling with a  Dremel reinforced cut-off wheel.

 and remove the old coupling:

Here is an inside view of the removed rusted coupling:   

and a look at the stainless steel replacement:

Once to old shaft coupling was off I cleaned the shafts with some denatured alcohol and heavy duty paper towel and clamped on the new coupling and torqued it down:

CAPT. MIKE NOTE: Before I put the screws in the coupling I coated the threads with Ultra Tef-Gel  which will help prevent any future corrosion issues and make it easy to remove the coupling in the future without having to use a Dremel tool to cut the through the screws. 

Once that was done it was a simple process of putting the motor back onto the frame. I tightened the two bolts and four screws and the motor was mounted ready to be hooked up to the controller:

Well, that was an easy repair and I did not have to contort and squeeze my six foot two inch frame into positions and spaces it was not meant to be in. I did the entire motor removal and coupling replacement while remaining inside the main cabin of BIANKA.  There was no need to empty the cockpit lockers and squeeze through a hatch like when I had the diesel on board. It's just another reason why I love my Thoosa 9000 electric propulsion system.
Since I had already removed the motor . It seemed like a time to check out the motor after five years of use. I'll show that in a future post.

EASY ELECTRIC BOAT MAINTENANCE PART ONE

REPORT FROM THE ANNAPOLIS BOAT SHOW:PART 4: ELECTRIFYING

I first went back to the Annapolis Boat Show back in 2007. At the time I was looking around for a replacement for the dead Westerbeke 27 diesel on board BIANKA. I was also debating between repowering with a new diesel or going electric. I was leaning toward a new BETA MARINE diesel. But, was hoping to  find out about the going with electric propulsion. Sadly, there was only one electric system at the 2007 show that I found and it was expensive and made for a much larger boat than my 30 foot Nonsuch. But, happily in 2010 I found several booths where they were selling electric propulsion systems:

I spent a good part of the afternoon at the Annapolis Hybrid Marine booth. Who are the new U.S. distributors for the system I have on board which is an ASMO MARINE Thoosa 9000.

They had a very nice display that showed an actual entire system working:

There was a lot of interest from the crowd. I chimed in from time to time extolling the virtues of electric propulsion from my experience of having it on board BIANKA for the past three years. I also got to meet some readers of this blog which was fun too.

And for those who just can't live without the smell of diesel in the morning. BETA MARINE had an interesting Hybrid system that consisted of a Beta Marine diesel engine which had a Lynch electric motor attached.

 You could motor with electric or diesel. It would also regen when under sail. Lastly, you could disconnect the output shaft from the prop and use the engine as a generator by having the engine drive the Lynch electric motor as a generator directly to charge the batteries.

I was glad to see BETA had chosen the same Lynch motor that is used on Thoosa 9000 on BIANKA.

 More expensive of course than a diesel alone. Plus you had the weight of both a diesel engine and batteries on board. Made for those who like the idea of electric propulsion but, don't want to make the leap to a pure electric system. But, for me I have gotten use to the smell of clean on board BIANKA to ever go back to having a diesel on board. My electric propulsion system provides everything I need in terms of propulsion without the mess of having a diesel on board. But, at least there are more choices out there.