Flexible Solar Panels: A Follow Up

A lot of you want follow up on how our solar panels are working for us.  If you recall, we equipped our boat with two 125 watt Solbian Flexible solar panels.  As far as we can tell, we're pretty early adopters of these panels and we have yet to see another boat with this set-up.  The word is out though and it's evident that lots of folks are curious about them - we've had a bunch of fellow cruisers come by our boat to do nothing more but to check them out.

While they are more expensive (and slightly less efficient) than their rigid counterparts, we opted to go this route to keep the lines of our boat clean and omit the need for a pricey aluminum/stainless steel frame over our bimini to house heavy, rigid panels.   The flexible panels can be lifted with two fingers and are attached to our bimini with zippers which are sewed directly into the panels and covered with a velcro protector piece.  This makes the removal and storage of these panels a breeze should we ever find the need.  We positioned them fore and aft as opposed to horizontally to ensure that at least one panel would remain shadow-free at any given time.  We find that, at anchor, we can move the boom to maximize efficiency as well.  Each panel is wired to it's own Genasun GV-10 MMPT Controller, and then our batteries.

So far, we are thrilled with our decision.  On peak hours during sunny days, we are seeing 14-16 amps coming into our boat (we have a Victron Energy battery monitor) but, in general, we are seeing 6-10 amps at any point in the day.  Our biggest energy draw comes from our freezer (when the compressor is running), followed closely by our refrigerator.  Because we are not meat-eaters, our freezer is mostly empty so we're considering turning it off all together and using it as storage space instead, but that remains to be seen (editor note: we did end up turning off the freezer and using it as storage).  We have the real estate and think that one more 125 W panel might just keep us from ever having to run our generator at anchor, so that is our plan down the line.

For more information, here is a fantastic article (I love his site, btw, he is a wealth of great knowledge) on the benefits of flexible panels and how to install them.

Naked Boat

If you look closely at the picture above, you will notice something is missing.  Yep, our boat is naked.  Our entire cockpit enclosure was removed yesterday by a local canvas company to not only be cleaned and re-waterproofed, but to have the zippers for our new solar panels stitched into it.  I described our new approach to solar power in an earlier post, and now it's show time.  Zippers were sewn into our flexible solar panels last week and the guys came yesterday to bring them back and mark where they will be mounted on the bimini.  It's going to be a lot easier to have our flexible, light-weight panels zipped right into our bimini rather than a cumbersome superstructure over our enclosure to house heavy, rigid panels.  How well our new system works remains to be seen, but we're pretty excited about it.  We'll let you know more about it when we get our bimini back and put these babies to work!

Catching the Sun

Our new panels are just itching to ditch the bubble wrap and lay out in the sun!

For many wayward sailors, to "cruise" is to live "off the grid".  Living "off the grid" is to supposedly avoid the complex web of power lines and pipelines that are (literally) sucking and pulling the energy out of the earth.  The term implies self-sufficiency and a life free from utility bills (sigh).  When people hear "off the grid" they might think of any number of things: Amish communities, the Matrix, but most likely, they think renewable energy...

Most cruising boats you will see haves some form of renewable energy on board.  It might be wind or solar or both, and the power they draw from those methods can either completely cover their energy demands (not common) or supplement them (more common).  We considered both wind and solar for our new boat but ultimately decided to start only with solar power and add wind later if/when we thought it necessary.

On Rasmus, we had one 65 watt rigid solar panel that was mounted to our radar arch.  This little panel kept our batteries topped off at anchor (unless it was cloudy/rainy) but did not, however, keep up with our energy demands under sail when we'd run our chartplotter, radar and running lights, etc.  This time around, we're doing things a little differently.  Actually, we're doing things a LOT differently.  For our new boat, Asante, we bought two 125 Watt Solbianflex panels.  Keyword being "flex".  Because we opted to skip the instrument arch this time around, we're planning on zipping these pretty babies directly into our bimini top.  Boo-yah!

Flexible panels are slightly less efficient, don't last as long and are significantly more expensive than their rigid counterparts.  So why the heck did we go this way? A couple of reasons:

• We have a semi-rigid bimini that we plan on keeping up all the time (shade is a necessity in the tropics!)
• We want to mount our solar panels on the bimini but don't want to add a bunch of additional, bulky and costly superstructure for those panels (which would offset the savings of rigid panels )

Not gonna lie, these panels are pretty sweet.  They can be picked up with two fingers, are no thicker than a triscuit, and measure about 4 1/2 by 2 1/2 feet.  We plan on modifying our bimini top so that we can zip both of these panels into it lengthwise, with one panel on either side of the boom.   This will mean that no matter what tack we are sailing on, there will be at least one panel that is fully exposed to the sun and free from any boom or sail shadow*.  This is the idea anyway.  Everything works swimmingly in theory, right? 

We hope to have these up and running in the next few weeks.  Though I know there are people out there who have gone this route, it is definitely not the "norm" (we've actually never seen it) which leads me to believe we are either innovative or stupid.  This remains to be seen.  We'll keep you posted on the progress and output of these slick solar suckers once we know it.  

Though we don't have enough experience/information to advise anyone on our new solar set-up, if you are curious/interested in a flexible solar panel array, feel free to contact Walt Genske of C&E Marine and he can set you up.

*Efficiency of a solar panel goes down tremendously if there is any portion of the panel in the shade.