These devices are designed for RV & remote cabin type living, the more powerful ones are capable of looking after all of your power needs and the smaller ones are more of a handy backup or portable way of having mains and DC power anywhere.

But are they useful on a boat? Well we have all the same power needs as these other users so there's no reason they shouldn't be of great use to us too.

They are relatively new products to the market though so maybe some real life testing is needed before we rely on one of these on a voyaging boat?

We now have two units on Fair Isle, the Ecoflow DELTA and the PowerOak Bluetti AC200P. Both are currently used as extra power / backup although our AGM house bank is now almost dead. You will see in Episode 42 I have removed two of the three House batteries leaving us with only one deep cycle 180AH battery (and this is old so will be well down on that capacity) so the Bluetti will be looking after most of our power needs with the Delta backing up. It will be interesting to see if this will be enough to carry us through the season or if we will have to repower during the summer (which will be a pain)

[ed] we actually managed to power the whole boat for the 2021 season on these units alone as the one remaining AGM slowly died!

I should state we only have two of these products on board because they were given to us for testing, I don't think having several of these units is the way to go if you want extra power (although see the note below on the AC500P as in future maybe they will be a way of having a slot in house bank) The best way to look after your power needs on a boat is to have a properly sized house bank to look after your needs. This will very much depend on your energy requirements, both DC and AC, and your type of cruising.

For us as live aboards with high computer and other electronic needs they are reasonably high, but they only become very high when you are looking at high draw AC units like microwaves, induction heaters, washing machines etc. Having air conditioning is probably beyond the scope of what you can do and would almost certainly need a petrol or diesel generator, at least for the off the shelf AC unit available at thee moment.

We are trying to do without our on board generator, we have a Whisper 5 diesel generator but it has been unreliable from the start and is currently seized, so inoperable.

Key to this is having enough power generating sources and having an appropriate level of storage for that power. For our power generation we choose to rely heavily on solar. If you have a boat capable of taking enough solar I believe this is by far the best way to generate power. We have 1,130W of solar and another 300W of fold out solar panels that we can deploy if needed (see the Solar Page). We also have a Balmar alternator capable of producing over 100Amps (see the Alternator page)

From the research I've done and the people I've talked to I don't think wind generators are worth having because they take a lot of wind to start generating power, they will almost certainly put a shadow on my solar panels most of the time as the only place to mount them is aft, where the solar panels are, and although they have improved over the years they still tend to be noisy and unreliable.

Hydro generators are not something I've researched yet but may be a very good option for when we are sailing longer ocean passages.

I will write an in depth page on charging and DC storage soon but for this page it's enough to say that we have more solar than our house bank can handle, much more now that we are down to one battery! If you have the space it is a good thing to be slightly over solared though. This is because with on the really sunny days you will have excess energy that can be used for things like running a DC watermaker, heating water, or in our case at the moment, recharging the solar powerstations and the electric outboard battery. The excess of solar will also mean you have a better chance of getting a full charge on your house bank on overcast days. On really cloudy days we use the power we've stored in the solar powerstations to make sure we don't run the boats house bank down too much.

As I said in the power station videos I think these units are good even if you have a generator as you can run it less often and more efficiently when you do run it. It also means you will have friends as you won't need to start a noisy generator in a nice quiet anchorage and p!$$ everyone off!!!

Links to Ecoflow:

U.S.

Europe:

Plus Points

• Light and portable enough to carry distance with one hand
• Excellent clear display that's very intuitive
• Rugged design with excellent rubber feet (it doesn't slide around)
• Very good inverter ???? pure sine wave (and the European version takes 3 pin UK type plugs and 2 pin euro ones)
• Regulated DC outputs at 13.4v (lots of unit aren’t so beware)
• Very quick charge on mains 1.5 hours, nothing else comes close and no external transformer brick, it's all done internally
• Two USB C outputs. We love this as our Macbooaks charge from them really quickly. There will be lots of other devices using USB C soon too, it's the up & coming connector.