When I bought my boat it had four 80 watt solar panels already installed over the dinghy davits and I could not have been more happy because it keep up with my power needs as long as I had sunny days. Well six and half years later I still love solar power, but my old panels had limits since they were at probably 10 years old (with age you lose efficiency), only 320 watts total (wonderful, but could not catch up after a cloudy day….I ran a portable generator once every 7-10 days to charge back up), and being on the davits limited the hours in the sun due to the hardtop being above them, that’s why I get a solar installer in Temecula from https://www.calstatesolar.com to put new panels.
I am lucky to have Joel as my best friend, because he is the king when it comes to electrical and mechanical work. We installed three 255 watt panels on top of the cockpit hardtop. Originally he found them in California, but they wanted $1000 just to ship them to Puerto Rico so I found them already on the island and saved all that money (yea!). It took about three days to complete the installation, but I now have 765 watts of power, on new panels, getting way more hours of sun per day. In fact my old panels usually did not receive sun until 10:30 or so and one day I saw the new panels had already made 40 amp hours by that time.
I have had the new panels for a week and a half and the best day was partly cloudy, but even then I have made over 100 amp hours extra. So I think it is easy to say the new panels are going to be amazing and help me not even need to use the generator every week. As Tim Allen says “more power oh oh oh oh!”.
