[Sounds of Bird song]
[Sighs]
This is the life,
this is what it's all about.
It is.
The sun is shining down,
a gentle breeze,
nobody on the towpath not a boat for miles.
What more could you ask for it's perfect,
it's one of the reasons I signed up for
this lifestyle in the first place.
But on sunny days like this
we're also producing free electricity from
the solar panels on Narrowboat Silver Fox.
It's a no-brainer for us,
you know how much I hate generators.
[Loud generator noise]
The noise just grates in my head,
it drive me crazy
and then there's where to store the
petrol or diesel and the generator.
If you've got the engine on
you've got engine hours adding up
and you're using diesel and it's just gonna
cost more in servicing as time goes on.
So it really was a no-brainer to get solar
panels when we had narrowboat Silver Fox built
and when we were having it built,
a lot of people asked us to do a vlog
a vlog on the solar panel setup,
but we wanted to give it a full year
so that we can show you the results over all four seasons
how we've been getting on with them,
because some people are a little
bit unsure about flexible solar panels.
So in this vlog we're going to show you
how we chose,
installed
and how we've used the panels over the last year.
what kind of power we've been
generating from them over all four seasons
and what we think of them a year on.
[Music playing]
We've got five solar PV panels
on Narrowboat Silver Fox.
PV stands for photovoltaic,
but what's the difference between
the different types of solar panels.
Well there's solar thermal panels,
they usually contain a liquid like water or oil
and as the Sun hits the panel it heats up the liquid
and that generates power to drive a
turbine or an engine which creates electricity.
PV panels or photovoltaic
work in a different way, there's no
liquid in these panels just
an electrical conductor.
So as the sun's rays hit the panel
it creates an electrical current,
that goes through to the controller
which is soaked up by the batteries
and it charges the batteries it means
we don't have to run the engine or
use a generator especially over the summer.
We can go weeks without running
the engine just purely from solar.
[Music playing]
Each of our panels is a 120 watts
and they're only 2½ millimetres thick
including the special adhesive
that we use to secure them to the boat.
It's special because the boat roof
gets hot,especially in summer
and so the panels can expand and
contract because of the heat from the roof.
So the adhesive is flexible so it allows
the panel's to expand and contract
when the roof's really hot or really cold,
so it doesn't damage the cells within the panel itself.
[Music playing]
At only 2½ millimetres thick or thin
you might think that the panels are really fragile,
but each one has got this kind of gel
coating, it's like a plastic gel coating on top
and it is really durable you can actually walk on
the panels without it damaging them.
We've had ours knocked when
Shaun drops the bargepole on it,
the ropes are laid across them
and rubbing across them all day
and a year later there's absolutely not
a mark on them, they still look brand new.
[Music playing]
Our five panels are laid on the roof in two pairs of two and the single one at the back near the stern deck
and we wired them in parallel pairs.
There's a couple of different ways you
can wire your solar panels together.
One of them is called in-series
and the best way to describe that is to think
of an old set of Christmas tree fairy lights.
You remember the ones where one bulb used
to go and the whole set would stop working.
Well that would be the same if
you wired your solar panels in-series,
if one of them was faulty or
damaged or just stopped working,
it would affect the rest in that series.
So we don't want to wire them like that.
So we've wired ours in parallel pairs, what that means
is that the first two are connected together
and then that goes down to the controller.
The second pair are connected together
and that runs down to the controller
and then the single one on its own
just runs to the controller on its own.
They go through some weatherproof housing
in the roof, go through the roof space
and down to the controller which is near the inverter about a meter and a half away from the batteries.
[Music playing]
The two pairs of solar panels that are wired in parallel
are connected to a Victron MPPT 150  35
smart solar charge controller.
Yeah it is a mouth full.
That single fifth panel is connected
separately to a smaller MPPT 75 10 panel.
But why have we wired that single
fifth panel to a separate controller?
Well the four panels in parallel
produce about 68 to 69 volts
and that's more efficient when
you're wanting to charge the batteries,
but when we add that single
fifth panel to the same controller
it drops the overall voltage from
68 volts down to about 38 volts
and it also has a negative effect on the
current coming in from those other four panels.
So when we give the single fifth panel its own controller,
it takes the overall voltage up to about
a hundred volts and that higher voltage
means that the batteries charge
faster and stay full for longer.
It's also got bluetooth so we can see
exactly how much is coming in or
how much is coming over the past month or
over the year by using the app on the phone.
It's really addictive though especially
on sunny days like this because
you're constantly looking thinking is it going
to be the best number we've ever had.
So why did we choose a flexible solar
panel rather than a rigid angled type?
It's a good question and it's a debate we've
been having with people especially boaters
since we started building Silver Fox a couple years ago.
Some people think that the
flexible panels are less reliable
and produce less energy and don't last as long and
that might be true for some of the earlier types,
the ones that had silicon rather
than the later ones with copper
and technologies moved on,
there's thing's called bypass diodes.
Whoosh, straight over my
head till a couple of years ago.
People think that if part of the panel is
shaded it stops the whole panel from working
and the bypass diodes are these tiny
little pieces of wire that you see running
through the solar panel, there's
thousands of them on each of our panels
and basically what that does
is if part of the panel is shaded
by a rope or leaves or a tree, anything.
It only stops that particular
part of the panel from working.
The rest of it works so we don't
see really much loss in power.
But the most important question is,
how much energy do our panels actually generate?
We have five panels, each one is a 120 watts,
37 volts
and just under 5 amps, that's a total of about 600 watts.
But like any solar panel,
flexible or rigid you're not going to
get exactly that rated power, it could
be a little bit either way plus or minus.
On an average April day like it
is today in the middle of April,
We can expect to generate about 2.6 kilowatts
of power that's 2600 watts of power
and that equates to about 216 amps.
On a really good summer's day
we can expect about 3.6 kilowatts
of power lots 3,600 watts
and that equates to about 300 amps.
That's probably about three times
what we'd actually use in a day.
In its first year
the solar setup has generated 318 kilowatts,
that's 318,000 watts of power.
That's enough to do 600 loads of washing every year,
or even enough to light up
Blackpool Tower for a couple of hours.
[Music playing]
Can you explain all that again
please in a way I can understand?
[Sighs]
When it's sunny
the boat gets electric for free.
YAYY!
[Laughs] Is that alright?
[Laughs]
When we first started this project a couple of years ago,
we have no idea between the difference,
between rigid angle panels and flexible panels.
We were learning all the time weren't we?
Yeah.
and
we kind of put our trust in the manufacturers of ours
when they said that
they would get
near enough as much as rigid panels would
even though we weren't angling them at the Sun
and our experience is that they have done.
We know a couple of people that have
got rigid angled panels that they have to
make sure a pointing at the Sun of the
same wattage as our flexible ones and
we actually got around about
the same for the last year didn't we?
Yeah we did.
Now that's not going to be the
same for everybody, there's too many
variables like where you're positioned
and they might have a less Sun over
the year these. We just don't know,
it's just based on our experience
and that's what this vlog has been all
about and we hope you found it useful.
The other thing to consider is of course
the seasons, like it's the middle of April now
and we've been really lucky, we've
got this for like a week haven't we?
Yeah.
So we've not had the engine on for a week.
but obviously it's different in winter
and we noticed that the solar started
going down probably September, October
and then it's lowest, when the Sun
 is at its lowest point in December,
we would probably getting on a
good day, 4/500 watts for the day.
Whereas in the height of summer
that could be up to 3.5 / 3.6 kilowatts.
So there's a huge difference
and when you average it out over
the year we get that 318 kilowatts.
So it's work for us,
but that's not to say it would work for you.
We would say do your own research,
that's what we did and we're happy with what we've got,
we wouldn't change it at all. You could
get rigid panels that you angle up to the Sun
and get exactly the same.
The reason we didn't want that is we didn't want to be
kind of messing about angling them and
taking them off for tunnels and things like that,
that's why we chose the flexible ones.
But do your own research,
hopefully this is come in useful.
If you want to advise on rigid panels,
there's plenty of narrowboats out there that
make videos on YouTube that have got rigid panels
and they've done vlogs to
explain how their system works.
There is no right or wrong answer, is there?
It's what suits you,
but all the information is out there.
We hope you found this vlog useful though,
if you have it would be really great if you could
give us a like, a thumbs up, click that like button.
Even better, subscribe to the channel,
got loads of stuff like this every week.
Hopefully when the lockdown is over
we'll be doing a bit more cruising,
but it's quite nice sat here as well,
we're making the most of it.
So subscribe to the channel and click
the notifications bell if you want
YouTube to let you know every time we
release a new vlog. If you'd like to
support the channel you can do so by
joining as a member, there's a link on
the home page. Or join us on
Patreon, there's a link up in the corner
and any comments or questions,
if you've got any questions about our
setup anything we haven't covered,
just drop us a question, we'll try
our best to answer every single one,
or just any feedback, drop it down there.
Phewww!
I'm getting warm now,
take my top off and have a glass of coke.
I'm going to go see if the light switches work.
[Laughing]
We'll see you later, take care of yourselves, bye bye.
Tara.
[Music plays to the end]
you
