Archimedes Project: Solar Power

The event of the river water sifoning into the boat created a disaster...it took out the temporary small inverter that was running the main refrigerator. This facilitated moving the installation of a house power system to immediate on the list of priorities. In the meantime we have doubled our gas consumption in order to keep the generator running full time for the sake of the fridge.

Up go the panels. Will be used as a roof and to generate power. We intend to cover 2" insulation with sunbrella and place on the underside.

This invertor is 1500 watt pure sine wave inverter with charge controller and automatic transfer switch to auxillary power if the batteries get depleated. (Yes, I just had Carter quote that to me.) In my words, this is a big mohunken piece of equipment.

The battery bank located under the companionway floor...directly in front of and in between the head and mechanical room. The two batteries on the left are under the flooring of the mecanical room. There will be several more batteries by the time Carter is finished. We must take the weight of the batteries into consideration when determining the placement. The weight must be equal on both sides port and starboard in addition to as close to the middle of the boat as possible.

At the same time, Carter has been dealing with motor problems. I think I mentioned in an earlier post that he worked on the exhaust system and was able to easily replace a gasket, fixing this problem. While down in the belly of the engine room he saw another problem and began to take it apart and discovered even more problems with the timing chain. We made a quick visit to Deisel Don for consultation. It is determined that the deisel is not in as good of shape as previously thought but will last a while longer. We will drive it until it dies.

The repaired pully.

It's hard to see the brass patch in this picture but the pully was cracked and had to be brazed.

In addition, the woodruff keyway in the pully was completely wollered out and had to be filled with brass, machined out, and new keyway cut.

After Carter got the engine put back together it was time to go to Port LaBelle for another potty dump. This time, Carter created a better method of tapping the holding tank for pumping and we were finally able to completely empty the tank. It should be a good long time before we have to dump again.

Captain Carter

1st Mate. I find this larger vessel much easier to steer than the Georgia Girl.

The Halcyon continues to attract attention whenever we take her out.

We had more time to test the electric propulsion on this run and it was very enlightening.

This shows a single Great White Shark trolling motor powering the Halcyon at a wopping 2.3 mph down the Caloosahatchie. And a fine job it did! (downwind) Carter has been doing extensive research and and after these tests he has definately decided to pursue a central electric motor in line with the diesel.

I was asked to define some of the terms used for some of our Landlubber followers. I'm learning them myself...Carter often corrects me hoping that it will sink in as normal language.

Jim Buoy...good question...I had to ask too!

Jim Buoy is the name of the company that makes life preservers!

We were at West Marine yesterday and I saw the same exact life preserver with a price tag of $110.00!!! Yikes! We are very fortunate that we found ours on the bank the next day.