Managing Utilities - Power, Water & Gas

One of the attractions of cruising life is the ability to reduce our footprint and therefore our impact upon the environment. Living on a yacht can be challenging, but modern systems allow you to easily produce your own power and water. Daily management of these utilities becomes a part of life to ensure that you have adequate resources to allow you to live freely and functionally.

Power

Like most cruising yachts, Singularity has a two part battery system: 3 x 200amp hour lithium batteries, known as ‘house batteries’ and a cranking battery to start the engines. The house batteries provide both AC and DC power that allows us to run everyday items like our fridge, freezer, water pumps, navigation and radios; and recharge our phones, ipads etc.

To give you an indication, when we wake up in the morning we are usually at about 80% as there is no input into the batteries overnight and the fridge and freezer are running, often accompanied by the chart plotter if we are running an anchor alarm. This is of course if we went to bed with the batteries close to 100%!

Good practice is to never run your batteries completely empty and for our house batteries we try and never go lower than 40%. This prolongs the battery life and at around $1500 a battery you can understand the importance of this.

Our power system is managed through a Victron Energy system which provides us with a lot of information as to how we are both using power and how we our replenishing. We have a small tablet mounted on our power management panel that provides a real time display, as well as being able to view on our mobile phones and ipads. This is handy as it means you can quickly pull it up on your phone and get an indication of the state of charge and how much solar is being generated.

On Singularity there are three ways to charge our batteries:

1. Running our engines - power is inputted via the alternator on each engine;

2. Solar - we have 4 x 200 watt solar panels mounted on our stern; and

3. External power source - shore power (plugging in at a marina) or a generator.

As cruisers we like to sail as much as possible, but the reality is that we need to start the engines to raise and drop our anchor - for the simple reason of boat positioning and either setting or retrieving the anchor in the safest manner. If the wind is light or unfavourable, bobbing around in the ocean ain’t no fun so we will use our engines to get where we need to be. Just like a car, our Volvo Penta diesel engines are both fitted with alternators that provide charge to the battery.

On our stern we have 4 x 200 watt solar panels fitted to provide us with free charge from the sun. Once the sun pops its head up we start to get charge and as long as the boat is facing the right direction for the sun, we are inputting power back into the system. When we have good sunlight we can be inputting up to 600+watts into the system and this means we can have our batteries back to 100% by lunchtime.

If there is prolonged cloud or the wind is dictating that we are shading our panels, then we may opt to run the generator once we start getting below 60%. One of the great things about Western Australia is that there is a lot of wind that comes from the south, meaning that the panels are often facing north and maximise the kiss of the sun.

All of this means that daily we are continually reviewing our situation and we have days designated as ‘low power days’ where we try and avoid any excess use of power in order to conserve as we await for sun to return. This can be a minor frustration, but really a small issue for us and one that is easily worked around.

Water

Water is something we take for granted when living in a house - simply go to the tap, turn it on and an unlimited supply of clean, drinkable water comes out. On Singularity water management is again a daily thought - no long showers here!! We have two water tanks - each holding 250 litres and situated in each hull. Each tank has a corresponding fresh water pump that pulls the water from the tank and sends it to where it needs to go. These pumps aren’t quiet so any time water is being used everyone knows about it. This can lead to anxiety when we have friends and family on board who aren’t as precious about the water as we are and it seems the pump is going and going and going….. (Jemma!)

In many locations, we can access fresh water at a fuelling jetty or within a marina and it is an easy fix to top up the tanks, through the tank fillers located on both port and starboard sides of the deck. However when we are unable to access water then we make our own using our portable water maker. This is achieved by a simple reverse osmosis process.

We have a commercially produced ‘Rainman’ sytem which produces 140 litres of clean drinking water per hour. Whilst many cruising boats have the system installed and plumbed into the boat, ours is a portable system that is stowed in the aft lockers of the cockpit. It comprises of two main components - a pump and a filter. The system requires 240 volts to operate and so we run our portable 2kva Honda generator to power.

The process is relatively simple - place an input hose into the water, place a waste hose over the side and then once the sytem is turned on, increase the psi on the filter system, effectively forcing the salt water through the filter at high pressure. We run for a few minutes to clean out the system and then taste the water - perfect and so the output hose goes into the tank and away we go. At 140 litres per hour it takes a few hours to replenish but it is a set and forget process once you get started. One minor inconvenience is dealing with the not so gentle hum of the generator throughout the process.

Gas

We utilise gas to provide us with the ability to brew a cuppa, roast some vegies and cook a cray on the bbq. We have 3 x 4kg bottles onboard. To date a 4kg bottle is lasting us about a month, which considering the number of cups of tea Pete drinks is ok!! We also like to roast vegies in our oven and Nicky has become partial to creating in the kitchen - something all of the crew are happy about, and something that was unheard of prior to living on board Singularity.

Topping up the gas bottles generally means seeking out a local hardware or camping store and cost for a 4kg bottle refill is about $16 - which when put into context is about 50 cents per day.

Gas can be a significant danger on a boat - given the enclosed spaces and the flammability hazard. Our gas bottles are stored in a vented locker - so if there is a leak the gas will sink and flow out of the vent. We also have a gas safety system that allows us to shut the gas off from the galley when not is use, as well as providing a gas detection alarm in the locker and galley. Gas will sink and therefore if nowhere to escape will lie dormant until it is either released or becomes a cause of explosion when an electrical item or spark comes into contact. We take gas management very seriously as it is a major hazard on the boat and, sadly, there are still accidents occurring on vessels involving gas.

The other source of renewable energy is wind. Addition of a wind generator is something we are considering but we will see how our first cruising year goes before we embark on that investment.