A Crash Course in Electricity

Remember that 3 a.m. low voltage alarm we mentioned a while back? Well, it’s been the thorn in our side ever since.

I (Nina) knew we would have something go wrong early in this journey, because boat life is just fixing things in exotic places. The only problem is we haven’t gotten to the exotic places yet. I was sure we’d be taking apart a head (toilette) before troubleshooting power issues.

And yes, you’d think that two people who worked at an electric utility for years would have a really solid understanding of how all of these components work. We thought we did. But if the last four weeks have taught us anything, it’s that we had a lot to learn!

Since Tom did the majority of the troubleshooting and research, he’s going to give an overview of our crash course in off-grid electricity. Enjoy!

Let me start by saying I do not claim to be any kind of expert here and really just want to share the experience we had, including the good, bad and ugly!

At first, we just concluded that maybe we’re pulling too much power at night. But as we looked into our power usage, the math just didn’t add up. We were using less than a quarter of our capacity but the voltage was still plummeting every night, low enough to shut down our refrigerators and all power to the boat. Something was very wrong but where to even begin searching for the problem?

After hours of Googling, watching videos of van lifers and combing through forums, I was left feeling like batteries are magic. Someone on the forums actually said it best, “troubleshooting electricity problems on a boat is like chasing a ghost”. But really, our 12-volt lithium-ion batteries have a full charge of 14.3V, which go into a float state at 13.6V and should stay well above 13V when under load. We also have six of them wired in a parallel circuit connected to four solar charge controllers, a wind generator, a hydrogenator and the engine starter batteries. Lost yet? I was. I’m not going to dig into the technical details too much because I’m sure I’d explain it wrong, but it’s a little more complicated than dealing with a car battery.

The first step in troubleshooting was pretty “simple”, test each battery individually under load and see if one is bad. The location of the battery bank is below one of the beds on the port side. That means taking everything out of the room, pulling the mattress into the hallway, removing the wood frame of the bed, removing the drawer and doing a unique boat yoga pose to reach the battery bank beneath you. Since the batteries are wired together, each battery needs to be disconnected from the rest in order to get a valid test and all of the generation needs to be turned off. Oh, then just don’t accidentally touch a red wire and a black wire at the same time. See, pretty simple!

After testing all six batteries and getting the same failed result, it was time to ask for help. We thought there was no way all six batteries went bad at the same time. Clearly I wasn’t testing correctly or I was interpreting the results incorrectly. This is where our luck starts to turn around. As we’ve mentioned here before, Nina and I have found that the cruising community is a bit different. Everyone is so willing to help, offer advice and genuinely go out of their way for others in need. This time was no different.

I sent a note to our surveyor to see if she had any advice. She responded almost immediately with a few more tests we could try and offered to walk us through them later in the evening. After speaking with her, it became clear that the entire battery bank was indeed bad. We didn’t have much info on the batteries and I was hesitant to reach out to the previous owner because, quite honestly, this wasn’t his problem. He had already gone out of his way to help us multiple other times. I begrudgingly reached out and simply asked if he had a receipt or documentation for the batteries. His response was, “What’s happening and how can I help?” Not the response I ever expected to get.

In the end, we replaced all six batteries and got the house power working as it should! Shout out to Nina’s parents for supplying a battery load tester and helping us move 400lbs of batteries on / off the boat while at anchor! It takes a village and we can’t help but feel grateful for all the kindness and support we received.

I’m sure some are reading this thinking, “You really sold your house to do this?” It’s hard to describe but the best description is it really is about the journey. Even if some journeys are spending weeks under a bed playing with batteries that could kill you. It was a crash course in off-grid living. We learned so much about our battery system, power generation and everything in between, which feels good!

Despite the battery issues, we’re one month into living aboard and there are a lot of positives! We’ve really been enjoying ourselves. It’s amazing how much time you have when you’re floating home is your entire world. There’s no commute to work or TV to mindlessly kill time. Spare time is filled with a lot of reading, walking on the sandbar at low tide, playing cards, watching the boats go by, listening to music and just being present.

We’ve used this holding pattern to map out our first big journey to get to some cleaner water and hopefully catch some fish! We’ll be sure to keep you all posted on our progress. Thanks for following along!