Drilling holes in the boat

I can confirm the steel on Percy is tough  - apparently old British steel is better than the new stuff of today. How that is so I've no idea but it took me a little while to drill and tap half a dozen holes to fit the final stage of the revised charging regime aboard Percy. 

I am turning into my dear old dad, he used to spend many hours pondering challenges (mainly DIY)  to come up with a simple workable solution. So it was with my simple 240v charging circuit utilising the new Honda genny in favour of using the engine. In fact I woke up early thinking about how to do it and in doing so saved some work and a few precious £££'s

So today I popped over to Percy to complete the install after receiving the new Victron 12/30 amp smart charger. This was the best bang for pound as I could not support getting a 50 amp jobbie and I wanted some decent kit to fit my do it once do it right retirement mantra ! Once again I went to On board energy as using JONOPROMO you get a 15% discount plus they give free delivery and even if selecting 3 day delivery usually get it the next day. The other positive is they offered good telephone support (for the Victron stuff I have brought)

I started by drilling holes to tap for small brass bolts to fix a 13amp (actually 10 amp) socket. The sellotape (sticky backed plastic if you remember Blue Peter ) is to catch the metal chips from the small 3.5mm holes... started with a 2.5mm drill to make it easier as I might have mentioned it was hard steel !

The cabling is temp at the moment from the charger as it'll be in 15mm copper when I remember to take some to the boat ! 

So when I plug my new genny into the hook up we get power to all 240v sockets and can use the 12v as the charger is putting back in whatever 12v we take out. The real positive is I'm running a 49cc engine instead of a 3 litre donk. The donk does not like ticking over and the icing on the cake is the boat is quiet and the little Honda makes hardly any noise. I can see via my phone what the charger is doing via a Bluetooth link. 

As you can see the charger was putting in 20.5 amps but this dropped quite quickly to under 4amps which the general consensus suggests is a full battery bank when the charge rate is around 1% of the battery bank capacity. The Smartbank is generally considered the best device for knowing the % state of charge when under demand rather than under charge.