Blue View – Blue's Electrical System, Part 3

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Blue View – Blue's Electrical System, Part 3

This week's blog covers how we keep the house batteries charged. The primary means of charging the 315 ah of batteries is the solar panels mounted on Blue's roof. Here in the southwest where solar energy is plentiful, we've had no trouble keeping ahead of the refrigerator, computers, phone and other electronic gizmos that now seem necessary. While the solar power provided by our solar panels is more than we need right now, the same may not be true once we're in the Pacific northwest, so we've invested in a couple of other methods for keeping the batteries charged...

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Blue's Electrical System, Part 2

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Blue's Electrical System, Part 2

This week’s Blue View discusses the 12 vdc electrical system, including the battery bank - the heart of the system. A little over a year ago, when we were still aboard Nine of Cups, it was time to replace our house batteries, and I spent a fair amount of time investigating the options. Our old Lifeline AGM batteries lasted seven years, not bad at all, but battery technology has changed a lot over that timeframe, and I wanted to see whether any of the new products would be better for Cups.

Now, a year later, I took another look at the available battery technology to find the right batteries for Blue.


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Choosing a Composting Toilet

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Choosing a Composting Toilet

You’d think that finding the ‘right’ composting toilet would be a cinch. After all, how many of them could there be? I planned to do a little research on the Internet, weigh the pros and cons of each, make a decision, place the order and voilá … we’d have ourselves a composting toilet. But, as we found out, it’s really not that simple. Read on …

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