Flexible Solar Panels: A Follow Up

A lot of you want follow up on how our solar panels are working for us.  If you recall, we equipped our boat with two 125 watt Solbian Flexible solar panels.  As far as we can tell, we're pretty early adopters of these panels and we have yet to see another boat with this set-up.  The word is out though and it's evident that lots of folks are curious about them - we've had a bunch of fellow cruisers come by our boat to do nothing more but to check them out.

While they are more expensive (and slightly less efficient) than their rigid counterparts, we opted to go this route to keep the lines of our boat clean and omit the need for a pricey aluminum/stainless steel frame over our bimini to house heavy, rigid panels.   The flexible panels can be lifted with two fingers and are attached to our bimini with zippers which are sewed directly into the panels and covered with a velcro protector piece.  This makes the removal and storage of these panels a breeze should we ever find the need.  We positioned them fore and aft as opposed to horizontally to ensure that at least one panel would remain shadow-free at any given time.  We find that, at anchor, we can move the boom to maximize efficiency as well.  Each panel is wired to it's own Genasun GV-10 MMPT Controller, and then our batteries.

So far, we are thrilled with our decision.  On peak hours during sunny days, we are seeing 14-16 amps coming into our boat (we have a Victron Energy battery monitor) but, in general, we are seeing 6-10 amps at any point in the day.  Our biggest energy draw comes from our freezer (when the compressor is running), followed closely by our refrigerator.  Because we are not meat-eaters, our freezer is mostly empty so we're considering turning it off all together and using it as storage space instead, but that remains to be seen (editor note: we did end up turning off the freezer and using it as storage).  We have the real estate and think that one more 125 W panel might just keep us from ever having to run our generator at anchor, so that is our plan down the line.

For more information, here is a fantastic article (I love his site, btw, he is a wealth of great knowledge) on the benefits of flexible panels and how to install them.