It’s still quite chilly in the boroughs of NYC but regardless around this time of year I always begin seeing more and more sailing and boat-based blogs in my feeds. David from Rowetel recently wrote a blog about testing battery cells for his “e-boat” and concluded with this useful tip for motor-sailing:
One neat trick, explained to me by Matt, is motor-sailing. Using a little bit of outboard power, the boat overcomes hydrodynamic friction (it gets moving in the water) and the sail is moved out of stall (like an airplane wing moving to just above stall speed). This means to boat moves a lot faster than under motor or sail alone in light winds. For example the motor was registering just 80W, but we were doing 3 knots in light winds. This same trick can be done with a stink-motor and dinosaur juice, but the e-motor is completely silent, we forgot it was on for hours at a time!
Motor sailing is indeed an art and takes some training and even calculation, but can be beneficial.
The rest of David’s fuel cell testing concludes,
It was fun to develop, a few Saturday afternoons of sitting in the driveway soldering, occasional burns from 86W of hot wire, and a little head scratching while I figured out how to take the design from an expensive buzzer to a working circuit. Nice to do some soldering after months of software based DSP. I’m also happy that I could develop a transistor circuit from first principles.
I’ve now tested 12 cells (I have 40 to work through), and measured capacities of 50 to 75AH (they are rated at 100AH new). Some cells have odd behavior under load; dipping beneath 3V right at the start of the test rather than holding 3.2V for a few hours – indicating high internal resistance.
My beloved sail e-boat is already doing better. Last weekend, using the best cells I had tested at that point, I e-motored all day on varying power levels.
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