Port Louis Week 3

Hi everyone,

We've now been in Port Louis Marina in Grenada for about three weeks.  The time has flown.  Lots of boat jobs completed, some fun with cruiser pals and some local exploring.

Grenadian sunset

Our first few days were consumed with fitting our new Lifeline Lithium batteries as previously posted.  We also explored the marina and the local area.  High on the agenda in the marina were the showers and the pool.  Both are very nice indeed!  The Victory Bar in the marina is a nice restaurant with friendly staff.  There's a very nice bakery on the access road into the marina.  And the nearest supermarket, only a 5 minute walk away, is pretty good.

Marina office

The pool

The Merry Bakery

We walked into St George's for a look around the national capital.  It's a 20 minute walk around the bay.  Some of the architecture in St George's is early Victorian and quite impressive.  The local boats moored around the edge of the bay are very colourful.

View across the bay while walking to St George's

Colourful local boats

From the town we walked up the hill to Fort George.  Nice views.  The fort houses the Police Headquarters and the Police training academy, but tourists are welcome to look around.  A tour guide certainly helped finding some of the better hidden parts of the fort.

View from Fort George

Exterior of Fort George

View of Port Louis Marina from Fort George

Canons at Fort George

The US invasion of Grenada followed the shooting of the previous Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and others.  Their imprisonment and execution took place in the fort and the bullet marks can still be seen in the wall near a plaque.

Plaque commemorating those shot in 1983 at Fort George

Fort George tunnels

A group of OCC yachts were in Port Louis Marina together, with some also anchored in Prickly Bay.  We all met at the West Indies Brewing Company for dinner.  Twas a great night with the crews of Ari, Cerulean, Favourita, Walkabout, and Zelda. 

West Indies Brewing Company bar

West Indies Brewing Company loos - with repurposed kegs

More recently we walked to the top of a nearby hill with Chris of Aussie sv Ari.  Good exercise and great views from the top.

Relaxing after the hill climb

View north over the marina

View to the south

In amongst all the above we've completed a number of maintenance tasks:

• Replaced old AGM batteries with new Lithium (described here)
• Replaced old battery chargers with Lithium compatible chargers
• Rearranged circuit breakers on the instrument panel
• Cleaned, inspected and remarked the anchor chain, removing several rusting links
• Applied patches to wear spots on the mainsail
• Stitched canvas patch onto the goalpost canvas rain catcher to improve its efficiency
• Oiled the on-deck woodwork
• Cleaned and stowed the SailingGen hydro generator and Torqeedo electric outboard

We also got help from local company Triple Services to repair our fridge.  Over the previous few months it had become unreliable - turning into a freezer for a few days then not working at all for a similar period.  Tevin of Triple Services came down with his crew and fixed it in a couple of hours.  The moisture filter was replaced and the system regassed.

Tevin of Triple Services fixing the fridge

We're carefully monitoring and testing our new battery system.  It is connected into our SignalK system which records all the data.  The graph below shows a week of testing starting with 3 days running on solar only, then charging with the mains charger, then 3 days of the mains charger 'topping up' the batteries occasionally.  A brief engine run is in there too - shown by the orange Start Battery Voltage trace 'spiking' in the top graph.  So far so good!

A week of battery trials

Trust all's well where you are.

Reducing Single-use Plastic Usage To Help Our Oceans

 As sailors, we are all too aware of the need to reduce our usage of plastics, having seen first-hand the terrible impact on our marine life. Plastic has touched practically every corner of the planet - even in the Cocos-Keeling Islands, we found the windward coast littered with trash. We often saw floating plastic debris when we crossed the Indian and Atlantic oceans, so the problem is real and pressing.

Today, there is an increasing awareness of the urgent need to reduce our dependence on single-use plastics. A recent ban on single-use plastic bags and plastic drinking straws in some countries illustrates this trend. We have made small but important steps on our way to eliminating plastic waste, but we still have a long way to go. 

Furthermore, in many of the less developed countries we have visited, reducing plastic usage is particularly important. Although some great work is being done by various organisations, many countries lack the resources and infrastructure for recycling. Because of this, it is even more important to not add to the growing piles of plastic waste in landfills.

This post describes some of the strategies we have used but this is in no way exhaustive and I would welcome any further comments or ideas!

Essentially our strategy boils down into 3 parts:

• Minimise usage

• Recycle and re-use

• Substitution

I’ll go into each step in turn……

Minimise Usage

If I can’t avoid purchasing an item without plastic packaging, I’ll buy the largest container that fits in our lockers , and repack the contents into smaller containers for immediate use. I do this for bulk pasta, rice, pulses, cooking oil, and even toiletries such as moisturisers and lotions.

Repacking dry goods for short and long term use

In this way, I’m only buying one large container rather than several smaller ones, and where possible, I will re-use these containers when empty.  Which leads to my next step….

Recycle and reuse

If I can find a way or re-using a container or a bag, I will! Many foodstuffs come in sturdy re-sealable bags and I will re-use these again and again to store anything from sandwiches for a passage to flour and powdered milk. Strong plastic bottles work well for storing cleaning fluids (for some ideas on environmentally-friendly cleaning tips, please see my last post!).

Old sauce bottles work well for kitchen use

I'm storing tortillas in this reusable bag

Some countries offer recycling facilities, so where they are available, we make sure we recycle whatever we can.

Finally, we’ve found that some vendors are happy for us to return their packaging to them so they can use it again.

Not only does Mandingo sell wonderful tropical fruits, but he accepts empty bags to re-use. What a legend!

Substitute

The third step is to find an appropriate alternative to plastic, which is the best option as we avoid using plastic at all. Some examples include:

Using multi-use bags when shopping: many people now do this as a matter of course, and we are no exception. Many Caribbean fresh food markets sell their produce in plastic bags, so I bring my own bags to use instead. I’ve had them for many years but they’re starting to look a little worn, so I’m also going to make some more bags out of scraps from my huge fabric stash!

It goes without saying that if we can buy items loose or in a more environmentally friendly package, we will do this. The wonderful medina in Monastir sold all dry goods completely loose, so we could buy oats, beautiful dried fruits and almonds to make our muesli.

No packaging here!

Making your own: by making our own yogurt, muesli etc., we don’t need to purchase them at the store in their plastic packaging.

Making muesli in bulk

Plastic free alternatives: it’s possible to source all sorts of biodegradable personal care accessories, such as bamboo toothbrushes, biodegradable dental floss, laundry detergents and kitchen sponges. We’ve made use of all of these, along with re-usable and washable sanitary products. Even in countries where it isn’t as easy to find such products, there may be local alternatives. For example, we learned from our wonderful OCC Port Captain Martin that coconut coir can be used as a pot scourer and lasts for several months!

Our bamboo toothbrushes - but check carefully if the bristles are also biodegradable

Despite our best efforts, we’ve found that we still can’t completely avoid single-use plastic. There are times when I open a packet of teabags or crackers and discover that every single one comes individually wrapped in plastic (why???!!!)! But by following these steps, we’ve tried to minimise our plastic ‘footprint’ as best we can and I hope that you find these tips useful.

I’d also be really interested to hear any other thoughts or ideas about how others reduce their plastics use - feel free to comment below!

My next article will explain a few ways of minimising fuel and water consumption when I cook so stay tuned.... 

Victron VE.Direct to SignalK

Hi everyone,

Another technical post today, following on from our recent Lifeline/Victron Lithium Power Upgrade post.  Our plan was to feed selected data from the Victron gear into our SignalK system.  We've started with the 712smart battery monitor which provides the most useful summary data.  The overall goal was to integrate live battery state with other boat data on our Macs, iPads and iPhones, record the data in our SignalK system and graph historic data.

WilhelmSK app with battery data in blue oval

All of the Victron gear we purchased for the Lithium upgrade is 'smart', meaning each provides a Bluetooth connection for setup and monitoring.  This is great but historical data is limited.  In contrast our SignalK system accepts live data and stores it in a database which we can interrogate and graph at any time.  Apart from occasional maintenance outages every second of all our NMEA 2000 data is already stored in the database and can be graphed.  The record goes back to September 2020.  We're now recording the 712smart's data in the same database.

In addition to Bluetooth each of our Victron gear has a VE.Direct port.  Victron provides useful information on this interface here.  Here's one helpful picture from the VE.Direct Protocol document...

VE.Direct Socket Pinout

The VE.Direct physical plug is a JST PH 2mm 4-pin.  The electrical interface is 3.3V RS232 serial with pins 1 o 4 being ground (black), TxD (green), TxD (white) and power (red).  The interface runs at 19200 baud.  Victron sells VE.Direct to VE.Direct cables of various lengths and also a VE.Direct to USB Interface cable.  Very importantly the latter is isolated so differential ground voltages don't matter.  Local grounds at each charger and at the house distribution panel could differ due to the large currents the chargers inject.  We sourced Victron cables at Island Water World and Turbulence here in Grenada.

JST PH 2mm 4-pin plug (not VE.Direct wiring pinout!)

Our 712smart is mounted on the rear face of the pedestal in the saloon.  The cable run from there to the BeagleBone Black SignalK computer in the navstation is about 8m.  The VE.Direct to USB Interface cable is only about 1.5m so we used a 10m VE.Direct to VE.Direct cable for most of the run.  With no known local source of JST sockets we instead decided to cut the two cables and solder the wires.  Should be simple.

After cutting the VE.Direct to VE.Direct cable then exposing and stripping the four wires I plugged the other end into the 712smart.  The wires were black, green, white and red as expected.  I measured the voltage from red to black and got -3.3V.  Not what I expected.  I then disconnected from the 712smart and buzzed out the cable.  Pins 1 to 4 were connected to the cable wires in reverse order!  Not impressed!  Only TxD (white) and RxD (green) should be reversed.

With the wire reversal understood I could then reconnect to the 712smart and look for output data on the white and green wires.  It was on the green (measured with respect to the red!).  I then knew which wires to connect to the 'matching' exposed and stripped wires on the VE.Direct to USB Interface cable.  I only needed ground and the TxD wires from the 712smart.  It's really not nice soldering red to black, but that's what was required.  And green went to green, when normally you'd go white to green.

Before heat shrinking the connections and the cable overall I connected the 712smart and plugged the USB plug into our Macbook.  Displaying serial data on MacOS is tricky since it really likes 9600 baud.  The following command worked for me...

stty -f /dev/ttyUSB0 19200 | cat /dev/ttyUSB0

Sadly I failed to take a screenshot of the data.  There is a burst of text lines each second.  Each line contains a paramater name and value.  

With the cable assembly now tidied up and known good I connected the USB plug into the SignalK computer.  I then listed /dev and found a new ttyUSB device.  With the SignalK Server running I could also check the identity of serial devices by listing /dev/by-id.

SignalK Server's helpful Serial Port aliases

Earlier I had installed the SignalK Server vedirect-signalk plugin.  With it installed and data available the next step was plugin configuration.  Here's ours..

SignalK Server vedirect-signalk plugin configuration

With the configuration saved I checked connection activity on the SignalK Server's home page.  Data was flowing...

vedirect-signalk interface up and running

And on the Data Monitor page I could see the data...

vedirect-signalk data set

So we now had 712smart VE.Direct data flowing into the SignalK Server and onward into the InfluxDB database.  The final steps were to create a new Grafana page to display the data, and to modify other Grafana pages and the WilhelmSK app's pages to show key new data.  I'm not going to try to describe how to make Grafana pages - consult youtube!

The new Grafana "Electrical" page below shows our house battery bank state on the dials in the middle, and historical graphs of each parameter for a selectable time period.  The engine battery voltage is also shown on the voltage graph.  Here we're showing about 30 hours of data...

Grafana graph page of Victron data

The graphs above start with the battery bank 50Ah below full.  We had just turned on the mains charger which was injecting 30A in Bulk charge mode.  The solar charger was adding a little.  Voltage gradually increased then sharply increased - a characteristic of LiFePo4 batteries.  The chargers then backed off the current in Absorb then Float modes.  For the rest of the day the mains and solar chargers kept the battery full.

In the evening the mains charger was turned off and overnight the battery gradually lost charge, mainly running the fridge.  This consumed about 25Ah.  The following morning the solar charger filled the battery bank by midday, under a very cloudy and rainy sky.

Our solar panels are two parallel SunForce 130W panels.  They guarantee 80% power after 20 years and ours are 10 years old, so should yield 234W.  A few days ago when the batteries were fairly low and we had sunlight I measured 220W which I'm happy with.

Here are our new batteries' charge and discharge curves from the Lifeline manual...

Charge Curve (note voltage step)

Discharge Curves

It's great to be recording battery data only a few days after installation.  We're already learning more about our power consumption as well as the new batteries and chargers.

Trust all's well where you are!

Green Yacht Cleaning Tips

 Living on a boat, we are very mindful that whatever we flush down our drains also flows straight into the surrounding water systems and whatever is living in there. With World Ocean Day happening last week, I began thinking about sharing with you some ways we’ve found to keep our boat clean without harming the marine critters that share the oceans with us.

Zen Again in English Harbour, Antigua. An idyllic spot, but everything we use goes straight into the water!

There are many products out there that are labelled as “eco-friendly” but these often come at a premium price. However, there are many products available that are just as effective but cost a great deal less. By using these instead, it’s possible to create products for every household purpose that (literally) don’t cost the earth!

For example, our general purpose cleaner is a mixture of surgical spirit, white vinegar and water, with a few drops of eucalyptus oil for fragrance (it’s also a very effective degreaser in itself). I’ve found this to be very effective in keeping surfaces spotless. As it cuts through grease easily, it’s one of the most efficient ways I’ve found to keep our cooker clean, shiny and grease-free. It’s helpful for preventing mould too, which is a big concern for liveaboards, especially in humid tropical environments. 

These can all be bought easily and cheaply

As a cream cleaner, I make a mixture of liquid soap, glycerol and sodium bicarbonate. This is as effective as any proprietary product I’ve come across and is much gentler on surfaces. We’re currently using a proprietary biodegradable laundry detergent which we bought from Ecovibe. However, I’ve also used just plain liquid or Castile soap and sodium carbonate, with some white vinegar added to the rinse water. For more heavily soiled laundry, I’ve found that pre-soaking items in a solution of liquid soap and sodium carbonate for a few hours, before adding them to the wash, shifts even the most stubborn ingrained dirt. Sometimes I pre-soak my tea towels in a solution of sodium percarbonate (“green bleach” - this breaks down into water and hydrogen peroxide) if they need brightening up.

 

Many of these solutions I’ve described are based on Nancy Birtwhistle’s excellent book, Clean & Green and I would thoroughly recommend this book to anyone who wants to reduce their environmental impact on the planet. This book provides helpful tips and recipes from cheap and easily available materials to produce effective cleaning agents that won’t harm the environment. The book covers all sorts of topics from bathroom cleaners, laundry detergents, to gardening and I’ve found it to be an absolute godsend in creating environmentally friendly household cleaning products that don’t cost a fortune.

Many personal care products can be made using combinations of coconut oil, glycerol and liquid soap - for example, our handwash is simply liquid soap, glycerol and peppermint oil. Nuddy also sells fantastic vegan and plastic-free soaps and shampoo bars, which have the added advantage of taking up less space than conventional shampoo bottles. Both Nuddy and Ecovibe also sell a range of other personal and petcare products, and accessories such as biodegradable toothbrushes and dental floss.

 

But I'm getting ahead of myself!

 

My next blog will cover how we try to minimise our single plastic usage. This is a huge issue especially on small islands which just don’t have the infrastructure to recycle.
So stay tuned for my next post…..

Add GPX Tracks to PredictWind Track Page

Hi everyone,

This is another technical post.

For about 8 years we've been customers and fans of PredictWind.  We started off with PredictWind's own Satellite Communicator for email and downloading GRIB files.  In 2015 we replaced it with an Iridium Go! for our cruise from Australia to the UK.  On arrival in 2016 we sold the Go! and in 2021 bought another.  While using the Go! we used PredictWind's tracking service to make our track and location visible to friends and family.  It is a great feature and position reports can be uploaded by various means.  A Standard or Professional PredictWind package is necessary to have a tracking page.

Zen Again Track 2015-Today

The tracking page was great, but we lost our old tracks when the page was re-established after we bought the second Go!.  Recently we've stopped the Go! tracking since we're not crossing oceans.  I asked PredictWind Support how I could keep the page updated while sailing in coastal waters.  They suggested their new DataHub product.

The DataHub looks good but I also wanted a way to add historic tracks we'd already 'missed'.  PredictWind Support pointed me to this page in their Help Centre.  The page describes how to send emails to them with track updates.  The format is very simple with each line containing username, laitude, longitude and UTC time.  Multiple lines can be sent in a single email.

We always record and keep our tracks as GPX files.  GPX is the standard format for chartplotters, including software chartplotters such as OpenCPN.  GPX files can contain tracks, routes and waypoints but we're only interested in tracks here.

Here's the start of an OpenCPN GPX file.

Start of typical OpenCPN track GPX file

There were two problems to address.  Firstly, GPX format is very different to the PW manual email format.  Secondly by default GPX tracks contain one fix per second versus the one per hour which is normal for PW GPS tracking.  So there were reformatting and filtering to be done.

I wrote a Python script to process individual GPX files.  It is probably not very robust.  Nevertheless it has done the job nicely, processing 300 files without apparent error.  It outputs a fix from the track start, a fix per hour thereafter, and a fix from the track end.  It is written primarily for our OpenCPN track files but also worked on our old Garmin GPSmap GPX tracks.

Here is the Python file header (for the geeks)...

gpx2pw.py comment header

And here's an example of running the script (in a Terminal window on MacOS)...

gps2pw.py example run

The script produces a .txt file from a .gpx file.  One then simply copies the text into the body of an email to tracking@predictwind.com.  Here's an example...

Tracking Update email to PredictWind

Within a few minutes a response email is returned to you summarising the fixes and any errors.  Here's an example...

Response email from PredictWind

After sending some single tracks I started concatenating multiple tracks into a single email.  This worked too, including one covering our cruise from South Africa to the UK via the Caribbean.  The response took about 15 minutes.  You can actually see the processing happening if you watch your tracking web page during the processing - refresh the page occasionally.

The tracks sent to PW can append to your existing PW tracks, fill in gaps, and add historic tracks.  The processing done by PW seems very robust which is actually quite impressive.  Gaps in your tracks are shown as direct (actually great circle) between those around it.  It's easy to find these and then upload the missing track - if you've got it!

Our tracking page (link at top-right of this page) now includes our tracks from here in Grenada back to our purchase of Zen Again in 2010 in Brisbane.  Pretty cool.  Spot the gaps!

If you'd like your tracks translated add a comment below.  It'll cost you a few beers!

Zen Again Track 2010-2015

Trust all's well where you are!

Lifeline/Victron Lithium Power Upgrade

Hi everyone,

Our four 100Ah Lifeline AGM batteries are 11.5 years old.  They've done amazingly well.  They were installed at the start of our other live-aboard hurricane/cyclone season - in Darwin.  See here.  Over the last two months we've noticed they're not holding charge.  Our battery monitor shows less Amp-hours out than the voltage implies.  We knew we'd replace them before crossing another ocean so the time had come.

Lifeline Lithium Aboard

Lifeline AGMs ready for retirement

While in Sint Maartin we discovered Budget Marine stocks the new Lifeline LiFePo4 batteries.  We're big fans of Lifeline, having had them on our last two boats.  On our previous boat we had to wait for delivery since the US Coast Guard had bought three months output of the factory - now that's an endorsement!  Not only do Lifeline now make LiFePo4 batteries but, very sensibly, they match the size of their AGM batteries.  An easy choice for us.

Lithium batteries are thought to be expensive, but their useable Amp-hours are nearly twice that of AGM batteries.  We had four 100Ah AGMs which we could discharge to 50%, so using 200Ah.  Two 100Ah LiFePo4 batteries would give us similar capacity.  And the price of two 100Ah Lifeline LiFePo4 batteries from Budget Marine was the same as four 100Ah Lifeline AGM batteries.  The cost was EC$6600 for the two new batteries, or US$2400.  Amazingly Budget Marine in Grenada had them in stock!  A 'no brainer' perhaps.

Another advantage of LiFePo4 batteries is weight.  Each AGM weighs 28kg.  Each LiFePo4 weighs 12kg.  Total saving 88kg.  Nice.

On receiving the batteries we noted their serial numbers were each less than 100.  Early adopters!

Inspection Ports open for keel bolt inspection

Lifeline battery party!

The other factor was the need to replace our mains and solar regulators which were 12 years old and did not support lithium.  And we needed to add a DC to DC charger to protect our engine alternator from the LiFiPo4 batteries which would otherwise burn it out.   That's due to the low impedance of LiFePo4 batteries.

We decided to replace with Victron Energy gear.  Victron gear is blue so a good fit for Zen Again.  And they have great specs and are very popular.  Island Water World stocks Victron products.  Their web site doesn't show stock at each store so I called the Grenada store.  They had what we needed in stock.   Twas meant to be! The total cost of the Victron gear was EC$3300 (US$1200).

On arrival at Port Louis Marina last Wednesday we walked around to the Island Water World store to pay the balance and collect the kit.  We then taxied to Budget Marine to pay the balance and the batteries were then put on charge prior to delivery on Thursday.  And Budget Marine gave us a 15% discount on the batteries as their first customers for the batteries.  That saved us EC$990 (US$370), reducing the price to roughly equivalent to buying them in the US.  Outstanding!

Victron Energy Aboard

On Thursday (day 1) morning we had all the kit aboard so the project commenced.  We swapped out the batteries and installed the Victron BSC IP22 30A mains charger.  We also replaced our battery monitor with a Victron SmartBMV 712 Smart which adds Bluetooth capability.

Batteries mounted in the pedestal (under the saloon table)

Installation of the mains charger was simple with new cables only necessary inside the pedestal.  Victron's installation instructions are very good.  With power applied we could connect to the unit from our iPhone via bluetooth.  The unit then updated its firmware automatically and prompted us to change the default bluetooth pairing PIN.  That's a must since we would see our neighbour's Victron solar charger! 

Mains Charger and Battery Monitor mounted
(note the mounting holes of the old unit)

Overnight on day 1 we tested the mains charger.  It is much smaller than our old unit and like the old unit has fan cooling.  In operation is gets quite hot, increasing to 30C above ambient.  That's 60C actual.  By late evening it had switched from Bulk mode to Absorb mode and by morning to Float mode.  We fitted a 50A circuit breaker on its DC output nearby.  And yes, our mains/shore power system has RCD and circuit breakers on entry to the boat.

Mains Charger charging
(on iPhone using VictronConnect app)

Fully charged batteries
(on iPad)

On day 2 (Friday) we fitted the solar charger.  It was mounted in the nav station where the old unit lived.  Installation was very simple since no new wiring was required.  We did the bluetooth connect, firmware upgrade, PIN change and setup thing and then completed the wiring.  The output side is protected by a 50A circuit breaker in the pedestal.

Solar Charger mounted and charging

On day 3 (Saturday) we tested the solar charger and watched it progress from Bulk to Absorb to Float.  We believe we're getting more out of it than the old unit which used PWM (Pulse Width Modulation).  The new unit uses MPPT (Maximum Power Point Transfer).  The solar charger also gets hot, but we haven't yet seen the low battery voltage with sunny sky scenario which will maximise its temperature.

Solar Charger charging
(under a cloudy sky)

Also on day 3 we fitted the DC Charger, an Orion-TR Isolated 30A unit.  We don't need isolation but the Non-Isolated version wasn't in stock.  The unit connects between our engine alternator and our new batteries.  It protects the alternator by limiting its output to 30A.  It keeps the current at 30A while in Bulk mode.  Previously we'd get 55A initially, followed by an exponential decrease down to 20A after 90 minutes and 10A after 2 hours.  So the engine will now charge the batteries faster overall.

Fitting involved new cabling but again only inside the pedestal.  We did the bluetooth etc thing and then completed the wiring.  We fitted two 50A circuit breakers for the DC charger, one on its input and the other on its output.  Both are mounted in the pedestal with all the others.  Incidentally this gave us a connection point to wire the Engine Battery voltage to the Victron Battery Shunt.  This allows us to display the engine battery voltage on the Battery Monitor.  We also cut and fitted a cover to hide the old battery switch array holes on the aft face of the pedestal.

DC Charger mounted below Mains Charger

On day 4 (Sunday) we tested the DC Charger which of course involves running the engine.  We ran the test for about 4 hours.  The DC Charger gets very hot, exactly as highlighted in the manual.  It got to 42C above ambient, or 72C actual.  The unit may have been reducing its output current at that temperature.  Orion-TRs can be paralleled to get 60A or 90A but 30A is plenty for us.

The DC Charger is pretty clever in its ability to detect engine start and stop.  We need to test this more thoroughly but it worked on initial test.  An external switch can be used if necessary.

DC Charger charging

Today (Monday) we reconnected the loads local to the pedestal.  That's our Victron Phoenix 500W inverter, two cigarette lighter outlets and two USB charge points.  All are mounted on the pedestal and it doesn't make sense to run cables to the nav station circuit breaker panel and back again.  They're protected by fuses in the pedestal.

We're really pleased with the ease of installation of the Victron gear.  We were helped by the minimal need for new cable runs.  I'd estimated 1 to 2 weeks and it took 4 days including substantial but not exhaustive testing.  We may need to tweek some settings to better suit the Lifeline LiFePo4 batteries, choosing not to get ahead of ourselves during initial tests.  The Lifeline batteries have a charge voltage of 14.6V, higher than the Victron LiFePo4 default of 14.2V.

The VictronConnect app gathers statistical information in addition to live data.  An example is below.  What we want ulitmately is to pass the live data to our Signal K system, store it in the Influx database and graph it with Grafana.  But that project's a little way down the To-Do list. 

VictronConnect app History display

It was good to have the opportunity to rewire the pedestal.  Additions, modifications and deletions over 12 years made it less tidy than I wanted.  I'm pretty happy with the result.

Ready to install the locker floor

The pedestal has a substantial, well-secured 'floor' over the batteries.  They won't go anywhere in a knockdown.  And above the floor we store a large volume of 'stuff' - mainly electrical, plumbing, gas and engine spares.

Floor in (view forward)

Floor in (view aft)

Nine storage boxes back in place

Blue Lithium!

You may wonder what we did with our old batteries and chargers.  We're donating them to the Caribbean Emergency & Weather Net.  This Amateur SSB Net runs daily on 3815kHz LSB at 0630 and 1830 local (1030 and 2230 UTC).  The same folks use the Friendly Net on 7188kHz LSB at 0700 local (1100 UTC) to stay in touch and teach new operators.  The Friendly Net loves to hear from foreign licensed amateurs, and particularly those from distant lands.  Nice folks!

Trust all's well where you are!