My batteries being down to 70% with the cloudy day yesterday, I decided to unpack, setup, and run the generator to make sure it works before I leave E-City (and its Harbor Freight store in case it didn’t) and to top off the batteries if it worked.
I actually owned one of these very generators before. When I purchased my boat back in June of 2021, I needed to move it from Titusville, FL (East Coast), around the Keys and up to Tampa. This would be a 9-day trip starting at the end of July, so it was going to be Florida Summer Hot! The water was also going to be in the 90’s in the Keys, which meant that the boat wouldn’t cool off at night. So, AC was essential. I purchased a portable (roller-type) AC unit and one of these generators that was ostensibly powerful enough to run it. It turned out that it wasn’t, and so I returned it after the trip. (Although I don’t plan to run my current AC off the generator, being a hatch-type unit it uses less power, so I could if I wanted to.)
The setup was pretty simple. I put in the oil and gas, plugged it into my shore power, and then went into my Cerbo panel to configure my Victron Multiplus charger to limit the input current.1 Then I cranked it up, and voila! The system thought I was hooked up to shore power and began charging my batteries! It took 2.5 hours (at 75% of its running output) to top off the batteries from a 70% charge. And that used up half of a tank of gas (about .6 gals). So, doing the math, it appears that once the break-in period is over, I’ll be able to hopefully charge my batteries from 10% to full in about five hours using approximately a tank of gas (1.3 gals). I can live with that. It gives me a warm fuzzy to know that even if my engine isn’t working (or I don’t want to use it to charge my batteries) that I have another, fairly efficient solution. And, if I end up in a place that’s unbearably hot for some reason, I could run my AC for a few hours in the evening if I really needed to.
After getting all that done by late afternoon, I decided to take a walk around more of the waterfront. There are a series of parks along it which are lovely. There are also a lot of quaint shops and B & B’s. Then I diverted inland a bit to hike to a CVS. That took me through some areas that weren’t so scenic. According to the signage, they were listed as historic districts, but I think improvements hadn’t been made since the houses had been built a hundred years ago! lol That little jaunt and my 2-mile bike stride on Friday revealed to me that E-City, while very pretty on the waterfront, had areas very close to it that definitely were not. In that regard, it reminded me of Daytona Beach.
The town does have a lot of history, though. I saw a plaque not far from my boat about how this was where Wilbur and Orville Wright would get on a boat to go to Kitty Hawk for all their airplane experiments, so that was cool.2
It was such a mild night, that I decided to try out my new Magma grill for the first time. The boat came with an old, round Magma grill (mounted on the stern rail), which I had used many times when living aboard in Bradenton. While there, I had come across a brand new one for $75 year ago, but waited until I started cruising to replace the old one with it. Up to now, it has just been too hot to grill, but tonight was just right, so I cranked it up and dirtied it for the first time. Much hotter than the one it replaced! Cooked up some Angus burgers. All the people doing the sunset thing in the park next to my boat were jealous once the smells of seared beef started reaching them. Lol.
However, soon after sunset, the temperature began dropping, so I closed up the boat to preserve as much heat inside as possible. It is supposed to get down to 54 degrees tonight! Time to break out the pajamas and electric blanket! I didn’t expect to have to do that for at least another month. 🙁
If they find my body frozen to my bunk in the morning, tell my sons that I love them!
- Because lithium batteries can take pretty much as much current as you can give them, a generator would overload immediately if there wasn’t something limiting how many amps (watts) the system was demanding of it. Normally, the Multiplus is configured to accept 30 amps because that is what my boat’s shore power receptacle is rated for, and the type of shore power I hook up to. However, that would quickly overload a small generator, so I can configure the Multiplus to take what the max working load of the generator is. In this case, the generator could do a starting load of 2000 watts and a running (continuous) load of 1600 watts. I didn’t have to worry about the starting load (e.g., the AC unit starting up) because the Multiplus was smart enough to substitute battery power when needed in such circumstances. But, I could take 1600 watts, divide it by 120, and get 13.3 amps. That would demand exactly the working load from the generator. However, this generator had a break-in period where, for the first 30 hours, it was not to be run at greater than 75% of its working load (1200 watts or 10 amps). So, for the first 30 hours, I would set the Multiplus “input limiting current” to 10 amps ↩︎
- I have to put this out there: I love how North Carolina’s license plates’ motto is “First in Flight” because the Wright Brother’s first successful flight took place at Kitty Hawk on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. The Wright Brothers lived in Ohio and did most of their work there. They came to the Outer Banks just to test their theories because of the nearly constant winds and sand dunes. Just because they came here, North Carolina commandeered the whole “first flight” thing, even though North Carolinians had nothing to do with it. They just had the beaches. Lol. (Maybe it’s because I’m Ohio-born that I’m sensitive to this.) ↩︎