Hot Water

Everyone takes it for granted that when you turn on a hot water faucet you get hot water. On a boat it isn’t so. It takes a LOT of energy to heat water from 65 deg in the tank to 120 deg in a hot water heater. Unless we are plugged into a dock, we would let the engine do this job. When the engine was running, hot engine coolant water ran through a heat exchanger in the hot water heater and it would heat up the tank. With the new solar panels, we don’t run the engine any more so, no hot water! To compensate, I decided to tap into our boats heating system and use it to heat the water in the hot water heater. On paper, it’s a simple procedure, remove the engine supply line to the heat exchanger and tap into the boiler lines as a source of heat. Yea, simple. Now, 6 hours later, 2 trips to the store and after taking a “spray” bath in ethylene glycol, the basic plumbing is done. Now, all I need to do is bleed the air out of the lines and give it a try but, that’s for tomorrow.
Tomorrow - Well, it works but not as well as I had hoped for. It turns out that the heat exchanger within the hot water tank does a poor job of transferring heat.

Propane

Our stove is powered by propane. We have 3 tanks, (10 lbs each) in a deck box just behind the main mast. Years ago when I first purchased Snow Goose, it had a single propane tank which sat on the deck at the rear of the boat. I figured that having the propane tank in a dedicated storage location would be safer than leaving it sit back by the cockpit. So, one of the first projects that I built for the boat was a deck box to store propane in. I wanted to upgrade from 20 lbs of capacity to 30 lbs of propane and I needed something to step on when I handled the main sail. When the project was finished, I had a nice storage box for 3 - 10 lb tanks (a 50% increase) and a place to stand on. The down side of the new propane locker was that it blocked part of the view forward from the cockpit. This is a good illustration of the positives and negatives that can result from making upgrades to your boat. In this case, good storage and better accessibility to the main sail outweighed the small lose of forward visibility. Everything on a boat is a tradeoff in one way or another.

Re-cutting a sail

The mizzen sail had to be trimmed back along the foot of the sail so as to raise the end of the boom about 4 inches. The hardest part is getting the nerve to cut up a good sail! Anna helped me mark the line on the sail that had to be trimmed. I slowly ripped the seams apart and then cut the bottom off from the sail. Then, with her help, I sewed on the new bottom edge of the sail. The new bottom corner of the sail didn’t have a hole in it any more to attach the sail to the boom with, so, I had to cut a hole in and sew a ring into place. Then I pound a brass inner ring into place to take up the strains that will be placed on the sail. I will have a whole series of pictures to show this process on the site in a few days.

Unintended consequences

I uncovered the mizzen sail today and pulled it up the mast only to discover that the mizzen boom will not clear the new panels that I have attached to the top of the biminy. What a mess! I now have solar power but, as a result, I can’t use the rear sail. Well, I could lower the biminy top (not a good option), or raise the boom. Yesterday, I unbolted the boom from the mast and moved it up the mast an inch so that it will clear the front of the panels. Tomorrow, I'll cut about 4 inches off from the mizzen sail in a thin pie shaped wedge so that I can raise the rear end of the boom, then, it will clear the back of the panels. This situation really demonstrates the unintended consequences that occur when you change one thing on a boat, that change often affects many other things in turn.

Pecans

Life on the Goose isn’t all maintenance, once in a while life just gets nutty. When we stopped at Decatur Al. (back in Oct) Anna picked up bags and bags of pecans from under their pecan tree and has stored them all over the boat. At first, it drove me crazy. It seemed that every time I opened a cabinet a bag of pecans would try to attack me. But, as the months have rolled by she keeps getting them out and cracking up a bunch of nuts. Today was a shell cracking, nut picking day. In the end we had picked out about one full bowl of delicious pecans and I now, I’m looking forward to pecan pancakes, pecan toped pudding and pecan oatmeal on the cold mornings.

Used dinghy

Well, as the old saying goes, “you get what you paid for” and that’s what we got. The dinghy that we bought is a Zodiac brand which means that it is made out of PVE fabric not Hypalon. The trouble is that a PVC dinghy has a life span of 3 to 4 years down here before the heat welded seams start to come apart whereas a Hypalon fabric dinghy has a life span of 10+ years. Before we bought it, the previous owner had re-glued the entire bottom (this is where they typically come loose) but, it was still leaking at several of the corners. So, today, I found the leaks and started to patch up our patched up dinghy. It took a bit of work but now the floor has 4 more patches where there were small leaks, the transom is glued back together and the high pressure floor leak is patched. Perhaps, now we can ride in it without getting our feet wet. As for Zodiacs, I would recommend never, ever buying one unless you plan to use it for a only few years before you sell it to people from Michigan!

Panels 6

The final results are impressive (it looks ugly but impressive)! Today, at noon, the system was producing 25+ amps and the Batteries were being charged without the ‘beast’ rumbling the background. It’s like magic! The power just keeps pouring in hour after hour. By 8 AM it started with a trickle of power and by 9 AM we were making more than we were using. Hope you enjoyed this series of posts...or was it boring? Let me know.