I'll share details of what I installed a few months ago in my 37 foot sailboat. It will be more of a counterpoint to "how simple it is to get up and running." But it enables a great many luxuries in our live-aboard lifestyle.
-4x 100 Ah LiFePo4 batteries (BattleBorn brand)
-3000 watt charger/inverter unit (Victron MultiPlus)
-3x 360 watt solar panels (LG Neon R)
-Solar charge controller (Victon SmartSolar)
-System controller (Victron ColorControl GX)
-Battery monitor (Victron BMV)
-A lot of heavy wiring, ranging from 4 gauge to 4/0 gauge. Some segments are designed to handle 400 amps (12V DC, if my system was any larger I would have gone with a 24V or 48V design to keep wire sizes reasonable). Of course it has to be stranded and tinned wire for a marine environment, so think along the lines of $5/foot.
-An assortment of bus bars and circuit breakers. 100A breaker for each battery, 400A fuse for the main connection, $120 bus bars, etc.
It was a very interesting project for me personally and really a lot of fun, but solar can easily become a serious project as your scale beyond maybe 500 watt-hours per day. I haven't done a final cost summation of my project but I'm sure it was over $10,000.
I've heard good stuff about Victron products, especially for boats. Is there a particular reason you chose it?
Also, do you have a diesel or gas engine as well? I know larger sailboats generally do; not sure about 37'. Presumably, solar and batteries would not be sufficient to replace that with an electric motor, unless you only used it sporadically. I can't imagine wanting to get stuck for days when it's both cloudy and not windy.
It seemed to be the most DIY-friendly product line with a complete selection of things that I wanted. Plus very popular so lots of armchair experts out there in the related Facebook groups. :)
We have a 36 HP Yanmar 3JH2E so that would be about 27,000 watts. Now say that wanted to give up the ability to approach hull speed while motoring, maybe 1/2 of that would be OK. So call it 12,000 watts, or 1000 Ah in a 12V system to motor for an hour. Our batteries were close enough to $1,000 for 100Ah so it will cost you $10,000 to have enough batteries to motor for 1 hour.
The solar capacity to get you into the barest realm of running that motor or charging a sufficient battery bank would be 3000 watts...minimum. The most I have heard of on a 40-50 foot monohull is 2400 watts. A catamaran could get you there, but you will give up looks and be spending $100,000+ on panels, controllers, wiring, mounting, etc. And weight is crucial on a catamaran so bust out more cash to make it lightweight.
All this means that realistically you will have 1 hour or less of electric motor run time. I have only been sailing for 5 months so take this with a grain of salt, but I usually have somewhere to get to before dark and I also don't enjoy waiting days for favorable weather or inching along at 4 knots in crappy wind. And I like traveling on the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. I use the engine to keep our speed above 6 knots. So if I was to go with electrical propulsion I would put in a generator (probably a DC generator).
Sailing Uma has some YouTube videos about electric propulsion on their sailboat. Their style of travel is much different than mine. They sail a lot more!
I'm not OP but also have Victron gear. They're widely regarded as having some of the best stuff. For us geeks there's a lot you can do.
All of their components network together using a documented protocol. Their color control panel runs a custom Linux distro[1] and MQTT which can be used to monitor everything and change settings. They have a lot of open source too.[2]
I'll share details of what I installed a few months ago in my 37 foot sailboat. It will be more of a counterpoint to "how simple it is to get up and running." But it enables a great many luxuries in our live-aboard lifestyle.
-4x 100 Ah LiFePo4 batteries (BattleBorn brand)
-3000 watt charger/inverter unit (Victron MultiPlus)
-3x 360 watt solar panels (LG Neon R)
-Solar charge controller (Victon SmartSolar)
-System controller (Victron ColorControl GX)
-Battery monitor (Victron BMV)
-A lot of heavy wiring, ranging from 4 gauge to 4/0 gauge. Some segments are designed to handle 400 amps (12V DC, if my system was any larger I would have gone with a 24V or 48V design to keep wire sizes reasonable). Of course it has to be stranded and tinned wire for a marine environment, so think along the lines of $5/foot.
-An assortment of bus bars and circuit breakers. 100A breaker for each battery, 400A fuse for the main connection, $120 bus bars, etc.
It was a very interesting project for me personally and really a lot of fun, but solar can easily become a serious project as your scale beyond maybe 500 watt-hours per day. I haven't done a final cost summation of my project but I'm sure it was over $10,000.
I've heard good stuff about Victron products, especially for boats. Is there a particular reason you chose it?
Also, do you have a diesel or gas engine as well? I know larger sailboats generally do; not sure about 37'. Presumably, solar and batteries would not be sufficient to replace that with an electric motor, unless you only used it sporadically. I can't imagine wanting to get stuck for days when it's both cloudy and not windy.
It seemed to be the most DIY-friendly product line with a complete selection of things that I wanted. Plus very popular so lots of armchair experts out there in the related Facebook groups. :)
We have a 36 HP Yanmar 3JH2E so that would be about 27,000 watts. Now say that wanted to give up the ability to approach hull speed while motoring, maybe 1/2 of that would be OK. So call it 12,000 watts, or 1000 Ah in a 12V system to motor for an hour. Our batteries were close enough to $1,000 for 100Ah so it will cost you $10,000 to have enough batteries to motor for 1 hour.
The solar capacity to get you into the barest realm of running that motor or charging a sufficient battery bank would be 3000 watts...minimum. The most I have heard of on a 40-50 foot monohull is 2400 watts. A catamaran could get you there, but you will give up looks and be spending $100,000+ on panels, controllers, wiring, mounting, etc. And weight is crucial on a catamaran so bust out more cash to make it lightweight.
All this means that realistically you will have 1 hour or less of electric motor run time. I have only been sailing for 5 months so take this with a grain of salt, but I usually have somewhere to get to before dark and I also don't enjoy waiting days for favorable weather or inching along at 4 knots in crappy wind. And I like traveling on the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. I use the engine to keep our speed above 6 knots. So if I was to go with electrical propulsion I would put in a generator (probably a DC generator).
Sailing Uma has some YouTube videos about electric propulsion on their sailboat. Their style of travel is much different than mine. They sail a lot more!
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I'm not OP but also have Victron gear. They're widely regarded as having some of the best stuff. For us geeks there's a lot you can do.
All of their components network together using a documented protocol. Their color control panel runs a custom Linux distro[1] and MQTT which can be used to monitor everything and change settings. They have a lot of open source too.[2]
1: https://github.com/victronenergy/venus
2: https://github.com/victronenergy
I have nearly an identical setup in my bus home, with 300Ah of CALB LiFePO4 batteries (half the price of BattleBorn) and 1800W of solar.
The solar is the easy part. It's everything else that makes it complicated.
Would love to see pictures of the setup.