trackman

That's the wrong order to disconnect. It should always be panels disconnected first and batteries last. Then reconnect batteries first followed by the panels. That way the controller always gets the battery voltage before seeing any solar input.

My experience is that our Beta engine came with an external alternator controller as standard 9 years ago when new. A couple of years ago the controller failed. Beta recommended a new alternator and ditching the controller. They said the modern alternators they now fit are fine with their internal controller left to do its own thing. I was sceptical but they have proved correct. The new one charges the batteries just as well as the old did. It shoves them up to 14.6V given time. I'd probably prefer 14.8V in theory. In practice I would rarely run the engine long enough to get past the lower figure anyway. Of course that's where having solar comes in handy, as it keeps on pushing in power hour after hour when there is sun. Even in winter, when we leave the boat unused the batteries get pushed up to a really good state of charge over a few days. Brilliant!

A foot in 12 hours! The first time we got caught out at Sileby it rose that much in about 3 hours! We went into the lock and shut all the gates, the lock filled in no time and we were stuck in it 2 days. Matty40 had a similar experience a few years later.

Very sorry to hear of the damage to Reg, that's seriously bad. Hope the repair bill isn't too horrific and insurance covers it. As said by others, these are widely available & good fenders. We have 3, the originals came from Alvecote, can't recall where I got the third. I won't be stopping using them, but then again we'd never boat with fenders down for the obvious reasons this sorry tale highlights! As regards finding the wretched thing, on our boat the length of prop shaft forward of the prop itself is where most things end up if we pick up something. It's rare for anything to remain solely on the prop itself. Fishing line is the worse thing to get off from there I find, as I usually use a hook from the bank and it's too fine to catch readily that way.

It doesn't carry charging current but does carry the alternator link to the battery and charge indicator light.

Incralac worked for me. 2 coats brushed on. Not as good as freshly polished brass as others have said but ours is 7 or 8 years old and only now starting to need redoing.

I don't know about the Vetus plug, but Beta use a similar horrible thing in their wiring looms. We get similar problems to yours as a result. The Beta plug & socket are basically just holders for an array of spade connections. I've been able to slip the iffy ones out of the plastic housing. It's then possible to clean them and tighten them up by a squeeze with pliers before returning them to their place in the assembly. If the Vetus jobbie is similar I guess the same approach may work.

Corten steel was chemically engineered to survive unpainted. This works because its composition causes its corrosion product to be waterproof and to adhere tightly to the metal below. Very similar in principle to how aluminium forms a protective skin over itself. The snag with both, I understand, is that certain pollutants can disrupt this protective coat. Certainly aluminium may be vulnerable in marine environments and I seem to recall problems with Corten in areas with certain industrial emissions in the air.

We began with a 68W Unisolar peel & stick panel several years ago as a trial. I wanted one like that for all the positive reasons people have given for them. We now have 3 of them, as RichardT has said. People got on the roof to steal the original one and failed to even lift a corner, so they are pretty theft resistant. I left space to walk around them but they do get walked on with no harm yet. The makers claim that they are less sensitive to the angle of incidence of sunlight than conventional ones. I can't substantiate this but they give plenty of power early and late in the day in summer. The roof (raddle red) gets too hot to touch in strong sun but the panels haven't shown any harm from this. They produce the specified 68W in the best sun as far as I can tell despite the heat. I suspect their rating takes the heat into account as they are designed for installation on metal roofs on buildings. In any case, like all panels they are dark coloured, nearly black. They would therefore get pretty warm themselves through absorbing the sun's heat even were they not on a hot roof. The big issue is the higher cost per Watt. I thought they were worth it for the benefits I expected and got, but it's a personal decision.

Our stern gland is about 10 years old. I have tightened the nuts on it 3 times at most in 4400 engine hours. On a previous, old boat, I tightened the nuts to stop the gland leaking a lot. I could still turn the prop shaft by hand afterwards but half an hour down the Trent we had to stop in a hurry. The bearing was getting hot enough we could smell it from the tiller position! Later it was established that the drive train alignment was well out, the prop shaft was badly necked in the bearing area and the bearing had worn oval. Costly repairs followed. These two experiences probably indicate the far extremes of stern bearing behaviour!!

It is very difficult to get this right I fear. We too had an incident recently in a lock we know well, where vlockies didn't let us manage events our way. Things didn't work as well as they would have if they had listened to us. In our case it was more inconvenient than dangerous, though in part that was because I found a way to manage our boat to keep things safe. Sadly a small amount of training can't give people the knowledge that comes from years of experience. Volunteers will rarely appreciate everything that a full time employee with years experience can.

I too reckon Alan is correct here! I'd have had our saloon stove at the rear of the space instead of by the front doors, given the choice. It would definitely help to even out the heat in the boat.

Beta use a multi way block connector in at least some of their wiring looms. This is really no more than a plastic block holding several sets of spade connectors. It looks tidy but makes it hard to see if the connectors are correctly joined, and hard to correct it if they are not. I want to replace the one in our engine room since it needs tweaking once in a while to get a good contact in one of the circuits. Lack of time and of a good simple replacement has prevented this so far! I expect your 43 has a similar thing in its wiring. The Beta 43 a friend had a while ago certainly did. If yours does, check it out.

As Nick says in my experience. Decent panels have bypass diodes to let power get past any defective or shaded cells in each panel. They also have doides to allow a whole panel to be bypassed when necessary too. I can see the effects of this by looking at the voltages on the panels under differing conditions of shade. Ours are in series. If a whole panel in our set of 3 is shaded it cuts the voltage by slightly more than a third. If I shade one or more cells in a panel the voltage drop is roughly proportionate to the proportion of the total cells I've covered. The voltages can be quite high in strong sun. Each of our panels can kick out over 20V at best so 3 in series can approach 65 to 70V at times.

Never needed an external aerial for our 3 mifi. It normally got a far better data signal than either of our mobiles too. However I got angry with 3 over data usage issues earlier this year and looked for an alternative. I got a deal for 15GB/month 4G data from EE for £15 with one of their Kestrel wifi dongles. It's far faster than the 3 unit and again we've yet to feel any need for an external aerial.

I have similar concerns about this Nick. I'm delighted to see the pub reopened but the loss of 14 day moorings is a disgrace. There were already far too few of those. The ones by the facilities past Refuse Turn are very poor and since the Cube was built are blighted by strong winds most of the time. That left only the few that have now apparently been half conceded to Sherborne Wharf and a very few in Cambrian Wharf. As a matter of interest was that red & grey boat still occupying a mooring opposite the reopened pub? It has been there so long I can't recall exactly when I first saw it!

Agreed, the display shows the solar panel voltage and current on the left side and as Richard says, the figures are good for the installation and time of day. The battery voltage and current combination is appropriate for what the solar panels are producing. As Richard's sums show, the solar input and the battery charging figures both equate to about 220 watts, so the controller is doing its job correctly given that the batteries clearly need significant charging. If the battery voltage was up near 14.6V the controller might be limiting the current out to them because the voltage would be indicative of them being close to fully charged. As the battery voltage is down at 13.4V even with the good solar input, they clearly need charging and can take all the power the panels can produce under the then current sun.

Dave you're correct about what Beta say. Our boat's builder did trials with the JD3 and different props in a boat the same as ours. He said they were done for Beta. Despite what Beta still say, he ended up fitting a 23 square prop on his own boat iirc and went for 22 square on the boats he built for sale. We've not found it to limit our engine speed, in deep water it tops out at pretty much what Beta suggest. I haven't found that we get any more complaints about out tickover speed than with previous boats either. I do think that it may cause the engine to be a bit more smoky though. I'm happy to trade that for the ability to shove the boat into a strong current or stop it on a sixpence!

Of course Nick it is to do with what you say. But then our JD3 throws a 22x22 prop which a less torquey engine couldn't handle. So it is to do with the engine as well.

We have a JD3 nearly 10 years old now and with well over 4000 hours. It has been brilliant, as has the Travel Power unit it came with. I would not swap it for another modern engine for our boat. Ok it can be a bit smoky but that's after too much time at low power on canals or battery charging. A good blast on the Trent or Soar clears its throat! It will never be smooth or quiet though. It will stop our boat dead in half the length that a Beta 43 takes for a similar boat. I've tried on friends boats. I would never consider fitting one in a box at the stern of a boat. Its weight and height make it unsuitable for that. In an engine room like ours in the traditional place in the boat it fits fine. The long cardan shaft with twin universal joints and the solid engine mounts mean that drivetrain alignment is just not an issue. I love it, but it's definitely a bit of a "Marmite" issue!

On the evidence I have from you I'd be asking questions too. Just to clarify, I assume your panels are connected in series. Is that correct? There can be an issue caused by part of a solar array being shaded. So for example, if one panel is in shade, with one or more orhers in series with it, that can reduce the output from the unshaded panels. Similarly if a cell or cell group in a panel is shaded, it can reduce the output of the other unshaded parts of the panel. Well made panels have bypass diodes that allow the output of the sunlit aread to get round the shaded areas, reducing the problem, but there will still be some losses. It doesn't take a lot of shade to have an effect. I've seen the voltage off our panels cut by a third just by the shadow of the stove chimney falling across one of our 3 panels! Wiring multiple panels in parallel similarly reduces the effect from shade on one panel. However there are disadvantages to paralleling the panels & I prefer mine in series. Could shade be an issue?

If your 14V & 0.4A was at the time you posted in the evening that probably was reasonable. The sun, if any, is low by that time of day now and we get very little from our panels that late in the day. I'd be more interested in why you got 60V on the panels & only a couple of amps in the middle of the day. Assuming it was sunny with the set up you describe you might have expected a lot more amps. However it does depend on how well charged your batteries are as well as how much sun there is. If at the time they were well charged, the controller would rightly have limited the charge voltage, and thus the current, to avoid damaging the batteries. Did you notice what the battery voltage was at the time the panels were showing the 60V? My controller limits the charging voltage to about 14.6V so when the batteries reach that the current tails right off. We only get really high currents when the batteries are quite low. We've had over 15A from 200W of panels in strong sun, but the battery voltage then was only 12.4V as I recall.

An MPPT controller will be more efficient than a PWM one. Any solar controller will keep trickling power into the batteries safely even when they are "full", so long as there's sun. It's good for them, combatting any tendency to sulphate and lose capacity. It may even reverse past sulphation and improve their capacity. I'm not sure about the battery charger. I think it woll depend on how clever the charger is whether it behaves sensibly when solar charge is present. I don't imagine leaving it on would do harm if it's a proper marine charger, but it may not be efficient use of power. Others will know better than I however.

Look at Bimble Solar's website. Get an MPPT controller, that will sort the voltage to suit your batteries automatically. A PWM controller will also, but it will give you less power from the same panels. We have 3 x 68W panels and they run our lights, fridge, radio and phone chargers all summer for free. In winter we get only a fraction of the power though, and have to run the engine for battery charging when we're aboard. Even in winter the solar keeps the batteries fully topped up when we are off the boat and all is shut down.

Form over function or vice versa. Take your pick!