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Showing posts from August, 2018

Make Sure to Find the Right Sized Solar Panels For Your Boat

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Solar Panels Can Lower Your Expenses While Boating The starting point for a successful solar panel installment is evaluating your requirements. We present right here a simple evaluation based on the test boat used for our recent report on choosing and installing a solar panel. A few values are from experience, and others are accepted rules of thumb. For additional details regarding selecting and setting up a solar panel, view the March 2018 issue of Practical Sailor online. Energy Balance Find the present draw of each and every piece of equipment (verify with panel ammeter if available) and approximate the number of hours operated. Record the number and capacity of your batteries, acknowledging that you can not draw below 50% charge without reducing their lifespan, and that you will seldom charge past 85% while away from the dock-- as a result, only 35% of nameplate capacity is actually useable. Lastly, total your charging resources, including motor, wind, and solar. When it comes to s...

Marine Sanitation Blog: Is Sailing for Free Possible?

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Sailing Doesn't Have to Hurt Your Wallet Raritan Engineering Company your  marine sanitation   experts would like to share with you these topics we thought would be of interest to you this month regarding how to sail around the world for free. Your marine sanitation suppliers talk about how the sun beaming down on the deck of your yacht. Beer in hand and the toughest decision of the day: trying out the pink sand or snorkeling with manta rays? Maybe it’s the romance of it… Looking at Tahiti, as in, the island in the middle of nowhere, and suddenly realizing,  “holy #%*&@, I sailed here from Mexico!” We are a married couple and have spent the past year sailing on 35 – 50 foot luxury yachts. In that year, we have sailed from San Diego, CA to Tahiti as well as visited twenty other South Pacific islands in the process. Volunteer crewing is something that has been going on for years and why more people haven’t heard of it, we still don’t understand. Many...

Are Fuel Additives Really Necessary?

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Gas Additives: Truth or Myth? Being one who has indeed spent many hours in exotic locations, cycling bad diesel gas through a make-shift filtration system, I am as susceptible as any person to the promises of a fast and simple remedy to fuel issues, which in turn is just one reason that Practical Sailor has delved so heavily into this subject. In 2007, Practical Sailor cautioned of the issues associated with ethanol-laced fuel (E10), and in 2008, we tested different products claiming to prevent issues related to ethanol and discovered varying levels of success. In 2009, we looked at dieselfueladditives developed to tackle biological bugs which thrive in diesel. In the summer of 2012, we took a look at gasoline additives, taking a closer look at the standards the market is using to separate the snake oil from the elixirs. While the ethanol issue has actually delivered a mountain of headaches to boaters, it has fired up a flourishing trade in fuel add-ons. Way back in 2012, at the Miami ...

Marine Hot Water Heaters Blog Dept: Catch More Fish By Making Less Noise

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Being Noisy Spooks the Fish Raritan Engineering Company your  marine hot water heaters  distributors would like to share with you these topics we thought would be of interest to you this month regarding how ot catch more fish by making less noise. Your marine hot water heaters experts talk about how stealthy fishing is successful fishing. Here are 10 tips for better results. Sound kills the bite, that is. Most anglers know that loud noises and vibrations can scare the fish and turn off the action as quickly as flipping a light switch. . 1. TALK IT UP Before you leave the dock, have a short conversation with your crew about watching the volume level. While you, the captain of the boat, may be aware of how slamming a hatch will scare the snook, the people you invited aboard may be a lot less familiar with the finer points of fishing.  2. STOP SHIFTING While a modern four-stroke outboard makes virtually no noise at idle, shifting it (or any engine) into gear creates a metal-...

Keep Your Alternator Going Stronger Longer

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Easy Ways to Keep Your Boat In Great Running Condition So I was thinking about Bitcoin today, the electronic crypto-currency that seems no less cryptic compared to exactly what's in my pocketbook these days, and this got me considering huge stone money on the isle of Yap, and since I spent the majority of my time on Yap reconstructing an alternator, this got me thinking of alternator belts. Before you fire up ye ol' iron genny for the season's very first smoke-belching run out to the mooring, to the dock, or to the fuel station (I sure hope it's certainly not to the pumpout station), you, too, might want to think of your alternator belt. A number of the following tips are actually culled from editor-at-large Nick Nicholson's Offshore Log report on alternator care, written throughout his circumnavigation. For a much more extensive discussion of alternators, refer to Nigel Calder's Boatowner's Mechanical and Electrical Manual, which deals with the topic in gre...

Electric Toilets Blog Dept: Awesome Summer Boating Destinations You Need to Know About

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Summer Boating Can Help You Say Goodbye to Summer Stress Raritan Engineering Company your  electric toilets  specialists would like to share with you these topics we thought would be of interest to you this month regarding awesome summer boating destinations you need to know about. Your electric toilets experts talk about how boating is known to reduce stress and improve quality of life. Luckily, you don't have to sail the deep blue sea for some great voyages. Ninety percent of Americans live less than an hour from a navigable body of water, whether a sprawling lake or the beautiful ocean.  1. Marina del Rey, California Just a 45-minute drive from downtown Los Angeles and a stone's throw from Santa Monica, Marina del Rey is the largest manmade small-craft harbor in the United States. Experiencing a major renaissance, the area is known to woo the rich and famous with its highbrow amenities, including the luxurious Ritz Carlton Marina del Rey, which i...