Last summer, we spent some time at anchor.  Kestrel has an anchor windlass, but no central cleat or post on which to lock the anchor rode down.  There is an opening on the port side of the anchor locker hatch cover leading to the bow cleat, but it is awkward...

Welcome back boat nerds for my fourth and final installment of building Kestrel’s solar charging system.  This post will address the installation of all components and commissioning of the system.  Solar Arch Installation Installing the arch took me two days, only about twice as long as I planned.  While the...

There is a lot more to building a solar charging system beyond the panels and mounting hardware.  You can think of the overall system as a three legged stool.  The first leg is the energy source side, the panels and how they get mounted to the boat.  The second leg...

In my last post I talked about how I got to the decision to mount my panels on a dedicated solar arch. The next step was to refine the design of the arch to get the dimensions and angles for the fabricator to use in the build. The process will...

This is the first post of a series about my solar charging system design and installation. I go into some pretty serious weeds about the decision process that led me to my particular solution. My particular solution likely won’t be a fit for your boat unless you have a Catalina...

When I did a power survey on Kestrel last year I was surprised at how much of a draw the cabin lighting turned out to be. I expected the refrigerator to be a hog as well as the various pumps, but I hadn’t thought about the sheer number of lights...