Wind Turbines

When we originally bought the boat a few things were installed on her as “essentails”,  you could argue that whilst in the UK, none of them we really that essential, but if you’ve been reading this blog for a while now, you will remember this was orginally only a 3 year plan.

So the mindset was that although the further south you go the sunnier it gets and therefore solar panels were the way to go regarding electricity generation whilst on the move and at anchor, (assuming we all agree that even sailing yachts need electricity (justification link) the sun don’t shine at night and therefore wind generators would quite happily top up at night, hopefully its windy

There are lots of different turbines, each manufacturer stating different facts on efficiency and output power etc, but few really promote their turbines on noise levels and power.

As with all work on the boat I’ve researched the living daylights out of this too, we therefore based our decision on two strongly prioritised factors, Noise first and then Power. Its no good having a turbine chucking out loads of amps if you can’t hear the shipping forecast for the noise.

On that basis we orginally  went for the Rutland 914is (Marlec) because they were very quite and also produced a decent power curve. Since then (probably 3-4 years ago) Marlec have introduced the Rutland 1200,  just as quite, but incredibly more effective, as you can see from the diagram below.

 

 

Teresa from Marlec did a great sales job on me at the boat show and convinced me an upgrade was in order, she’s good, but it wasn’t really a hard sell for her, it made perfect sense, over double the output for the same wind, same engineering same noise levels easy decision. Oh and because the 914i have such a great reputation an easy sale of the old ones on ebay!

 

 

 

 

In the last few days since install we’ve had a few days of 15 knts maybe a tad more producing 130 odd watts which equates to nearly 10amps of power, EACH! hoohah! that’ll do me tommy! (Helen gives everything onboard a name,  the turbines? well Tommy and Timmy of course!) 😉

 

 

2 Comments

  1. I’ve bought 2 Rutland 1200s and am delighted to see the same configuration I’m planning on your pictures.

    May I ask some questions:
    – What about shading issues that lowers the solar power output?
    – How much noise do the blades make?
    – How much vibration noise do you hear inside?

    1. Ok so first things first, don’t expect too much from the turbines and low speed, they need a lot of wind (>15 knots) before they start to perform properly. They do resonant a bit, but thankfully its more of a woooooing wind sort of noise below, Helen, oddly quite likes it? there’s very little noise outside if you have back cabin light sleepers they might notice it, but likely not. What kind of yacht do you have? and finally, the shading of the Turbines on the panels is slight, almost non-existent as long as you get them high enough, hope that helps. KR Steve

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