Living off the grid was a bonus when we decied to be live aboard ! These are our top Refits to change a Dock Queen into a Cruiser
In our last episode we revealed our top 20 ‘must haves’ when we bought the ‘ElliYacht’
However, there were 3 items that we didn’t get on that list that we need to transform our live aboard from a ‘dock queen’ to a ‘cruiser’.
Since our kids have all left the house our goals are to:
• Move from land to the water on a liveaboard,
• Keep working for the next 1015 years,
• And cruise the Pacific Northwest every chance we can, at a fairly good clip (because we still work)!
Soooo here is our top 5 refit items that we tackled to turn our ‘Dock Queen’ into a ‘Cruiser’
• If you don’t have ground tackle… you can’t anchor out! (Rocna)
• If you can’t keep your butt in the seat you can’t navigate less than calm waters (Stidd)
• If you don’t have enough energy, you’ve gotta do without and that ain’t our plan. We use 500w on average but can randomly hit 8KWh for a couple seconds or a couple hours. How?! (AC, electric heat, washer & dryer, fireplace, refer, coffee maker, hot water tank, combo grill/microwave/convection, stereos)
• The shore (50amp 240V Split phase) = 12KWh but you can’t take it with you!!
• Fuel (genset) loads hover at 500W generator
• is 10K cant run it for 20% loads, and I don’t want to have it randomly turning on and bugging our neighbors on the hook when I want to take a shower, run the AC….
• But dream with me for a moment… what if you could have an Inverter that gives us all of the power we need and manages it’sself?!
• 3KW = 8KWH
• Watching the batteries constantly to recharge is a bore…. Auto gen
• Fine if you’re a live aboard but, I’m not at my boat everyday…. VRM Portal
• From bed
• From another country
• You can even start your genset!
• Even better…
• Tired of flipping the breaker at the dock when you take too much power? Usually in your PJ’s… Power share
• Quite hours to keep your friends
• What happens if the power goes out on the dock…. Auto gen
• Don’t I have to balance my genset with loads? Hell No!
• Batteries (acid, heavy, inverters can only supply so much power) if we wanted 2.5x the inverter load in reserve with AGM it would be 14 D8 240amp hour batteries with a 50% floor, 2,200lbs, cost +$8K, it would take just under 6hrs to recharge them with a 140amp charger, and where the f am I going to put them?!
• But what if I could do that with 12 138Ah batteries with 95% floor, weigh just 600lbs, recharge in just under 3 hours and cost $6,000?! You can with LifePO4. Here’s how…

Link to Valence batteries
https://ebay.to/3btXhYx
https://www.amazon.com/shop/elliyacht

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• Light
• Recharge ASAP
• GenSet loves them (load & keep the hours down)
• Clean
• 4,000+ cycles (100 days = 40 years basically they may outlive me…)
• Safe
• $ used…
• Downside = BMS cutout safety/cook alternators/redundancy/nothing runs on 48V! So we kept a separate 12V AGM system
• If you don’t have water we can only stay out 45 days at a time! Fail (Water maker), and ## 1)
• Electronics aren’t nice to have anymore! Raymarine
• 6 screens 3 on each helm
• WTF?!
• Charts
• Radar
• Engine integration
• Flir Thermal
• AR Cameras
• Wireless VHF who has time for a cord?! So 1980’s!
• Fusion (stereo) & Victron (power)