Cruising an Australian river in a converted solar electric boat #Boating #solar

David describes using his converted solar power boat on a recent trip:

I’ve just spent 6 days on the Murray River, cruising about 200km on solar power alone, sleeping and cooking on my solar powered Hartley TS16 sailboat. I’ve always wanted to do a longer trip based on the Solar Boat design from 5 years ago. I’ve made a few minor improvements – a better (75AH) battery pack, automatic charge cutout, and cleaned up the wiring.

The photo above shows the “Solar Hartley”, the Honda 5HP outboard (which didn’t get started on this trip) obscuring the Torqeedo 2kW unit. The electric motor is inside the black oval visible under the rear of the boat, with the orange propeller.

The solar power peaks at about 380W (14A at 26-27V) and maintains that for 5 hours, so most of the cruising is “energy neutral”. I was actually surprised by how much power I was generating, I guess because it’s Summer here (the previous trip was in Autumn). I’m generating greater than 100W solar from 0800 to 1800. After 0900 the solar power means the battery draw is so low you can effectively drive all day.

Read more about David’s adventures and the boat in the post here.