Electrical System

On Friday while at Oppenhuizen I tried the 24 volt battery charger (which charges the engine batteries) and it went up to 32 volts.  Not a good thing as this will destroy the batteries pretty quickly.
A bit of searching and I found AquaSolar just a 600m walk away. I was able to organise for someone to come out to the boat in the afternoon and run some tests on the electrical system.

End result of all that is that yes the charger was stuffed.  Dutch / English doesn't really matter, stuffed is stuffed. Also, both the 24 volt alternator and the 12 volt alternator are working ok but the wire from the 24 volt alternator to the starter was way too small and the 12 volt alternator wire to the batteries was also way too small.

For the technically minded the formula goes something like this (Amps x cable length) / (voltage drop as a % x volts) = diameter of the wire.

Anyway, I had noticed previously that we were really only getting about 20 amps out of the 12 volt alternator when we're running the motor.  63 Euro later for some cables which I fitted myself and we are now able to charge at 50 amps.  It means that in 24 hours when we consume about 100Ah, instead of it taking 5 hours of running the engine to charge again we will be able to do that in 2 hours.  Reality is we never sit there with the engine running just to charge the batteries but when we plug in at the next marina we won't be charging batteries.

 The blue wire shows the thickness of the old wire.

And the red wire is the size of the new wire.

Oh yeah, we paid 119 Euro for a new 24 volt charger that we will leave in the box until we need it.  I've tested it but in theory we should never need it.