By Chris German • 13 Sep, 2020 •

We’ve all done it. The simple act of making coffee or toast sparking a precipitous collapse of the entire vessels operation. If we are lucky, a simple flip of the switch can return life to normalcy. For the unlucky however, an unthinking twist of the air conditioner dial and your day will be spent finding a new electrical panel followed by the rewiring the whole enchilada in 90 degree heat. Another One of My Stories I speak from experience. This past spring as we stopped in a KOA in Nashville, we discovered how integral the 12-volt game was to our new existence in a 31’ travel trailer. The yard had less than perfect wiring and at 5 o’clock on a Saturday in May, the demand for air conditioning and laundry put the system in brown out mode. We were plugged in with 30 amp service and unknowingly turned the air conditioner on to take the Southern Town’s characteristic humidity down to a life sustaining level. We didn’t think much of it when the system kicked and all our 110 volt appliances went off line. I had wired our RV with our sailboats two deep cycle batteries to keep the lights and heater working, but everything else including the AC was dependent upon residential electricity to run. When the fridge turned off, we knew we had too much load on the system. What we didn’t know however is that a low voltage situation was developing outside at the post due to the over demand of electricity on the yard electrical system. By turning on our air conditioner, our demand was more than the system could provide and the ensuing resistance melted all the positive wire terminals on our electrical board. We didn’t discover that until Flagstaff when we smelled plastic burning early one day and realized that our entire panel was at risk of bursting into flames. After a few calls to the local RV parts places, we found a replacement board for $300 and my wife (she’s the electrician in our family) wired all the 12 volt and 110 volt breakers back in and got the fridge working again. The only glitch was when I put the breakers back in, nothing worked because I put them in the wrong way, but she figured it out and for the rest of the voyage we were sitting pretty in air conditioned bliss. The Takeaway: Never Trust the Facility What did we learn from this adventure in electrical wizardry? Never trust the wiring of a yard or marina. Every sailboat I have ever been on has a reverse polarity alarm on their breaker panel. This is designed to tell the operator that your boat is being filled with errant electrical current and all your instruments could be fried. It's supposed to break the circuit when that happens to protect your system. In marinas, there are all kinds of boats and all kinds of configurations. A mis-wired generator or solar system can feed electricity back up the line, just as much as the plug on the wall can feed electricity into your boat or RV. When that back flow happens, it can feed into every other boat on the dock and potentially cause mayhem and chaos with your instrumentation. Here in Bullfrog Marina, Utah; we have a few hundred houseboats all drawing and feeding electricity at the same time. Some boats every once in a while will start feeding electricity back into the system. When that happens, the management has to shut the circuit to the problem boat and lock the box until the owner can get someone to fix their backfeeding electrical issue. It's not that different in RVs either. Usually it’s not back feeding that causes the issues, instead, as it was in our case, it was an over demand of the system that fried our panel. While boats have reverse polarity breakers installed to protect their boats wiring, RVs rarely have any wired in protection. We purchased an RV surge protector that will scram when there is a low voltage or high voltage situation detected; thereby protecting our appliances and our panel wherever we might plug in. The only drawback to the surge protector was that if it shut down we had to manually turn it back on, a real scary concept in the desert. We feared coming home to find our AC had shut off with our cats and dogs languishing inside in the desert heat, but thankfully that never happened. There is a backup system you can buy for as little as $1000 that will keep everything running in a scram event, but it wasn’t in our budget. But What About This 12 Volt Game? Yes you're right, I have been talking about 110 stuff when I enticed you to read an article about the 12 volt game. But really- they are all connected . Besides...“The 12 Volt Game” sounds so much better than “How to Not Overload Your Residential Electrical Needs in a Boat or Recreational Vehicle”. Whether you're an Off-Gridder, a LiveAboard Sailor or a Boon Docker, you know what I am talking about a lot better than the grid dependent mobile lifers who bounce from RV park to RV Park or live at the dock. If your electricity is supplied by battery or any other DC appliance, you have the independence to go where you want to go and live how you want to live, providing you play the 12 volt Game. You can plug in this light and that cell phone, as long as you don't turn on the inverter. OR you can turn on the coffee pot, providing you don't turn on the hair dryer. This is the game and the electrically independent person knows it all too well or you will get to know it very shortly. If you don’t know what I am talking about, it's the draw of amperage of your various appliances from your battery bank or inverter or generator or solar panels. Once you have reached the maximum output of your system, it will let you know that it will take no more by shutting down. The key is to know what's drawing what kind of electrical load and budgeting what you run and what series. If you have an inverter turning your 12 volt electricity into 110 for your household appliances, it will run certain appliances but will shut off if you ask to run too many at one time. With the inverter though, it has its own electrical needs to run the fan and resistance of the wires and such, so you have to budget that first when figuring out what your electrical draw will be before you try to run anything else off of that inverter. It is a game like any other, and figuring out what you can run together and what needs to be run alone so you don't shut down the whole system is just part of living aboard or off-grid. But in this game, you can’t mortgage the boardwalk to get extra juice when you are running low. When you're out you're out. Unless you put more in. GOD BLESS GREEN TECHNOLOGY There was a time when the only way to get electricity was plugging in to the grid or burning fossil fuels to run a generator. Now we have solar panels, water generators, wind turbines and geothermal. The new ways to use natural energy to produce electricity is mind blowing. The only drawback is our battery technology is lagging, but the person who can make a battery that lasts for days and doesn’t catch fire or cost a fortune will revolutionize human use of green technology. If you want to up your 12-Volt budget all you have to do is add a solar panel or wind generator to your system and you will have more power coming in with the flip of a switch. They are cheaper now than ever and a quick stop to Harbor Freight can add all kinds of power to your boat or RV. However, saving that power for the times when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, you need a battery and that where it gets expensive. A good gel battery or deep cycle battery can cost hundreds and with a series of batteries your talking thousands. What’s more you need a regulator to regulate the flow of voltage from your solar panel to your battery or you risk frying your $1000 battery bank. A good primer on solar panels and battery wiring would be your best bet if you are considering wandering down the Green Technology path. The good news is though, Youtube is rife with videos on installing solar and wind power so get busy googling it before you buy it. Sailboats, RVs and OffGrid homes are the way of the future. Living independent of the electrical grid may cost you a pretty penny, but the freedom you will get to not have to rely on the grid is more than worth it I think. You do have to play the game though and budget your electrical needs based on your supply, but that is a small cost when compared to the ability to pick up and go wherever you want on land or sea and still charge your cell phone. Thanks for reading and do good, have fun, sail far.