Since her conception we have always tried to make the Snark as sustainable as possible. But that is not as easy as it sounds and we have often fallen short of our vision, so we have done some thinking and set about doing it better.
Yes, we are a sailing barge but when you are trying to meet an ambitious pre-planned itinerary, the luxury of a slow gentle passage under sail might not be realistic. We have had to resort to diesel power for to often. This is noisy, carbon emitting and less fun. So for the coming season we have simplified our plans and left more time for those chilled out sailing days, we and our passengers love so much. It doesn't mean we won't sometimes revert to the iron sail but hopefully much less often.
Our onboard equipment is all electric, no gas cooking or heating. This works well when we have shore power to plug into but when we are off grid (as we will be much of this summer) we have had to rely on a diesel generator for our power. So last autumn we applied to Devon County Council for a de-carbonisation GIF grant to install a large 4.5 kw PV array on our upper deck and to upgrade our battery storage bank. We got confirmation that the grant was available at the end of January and we currently have 3 x 24v 200Ahr lithium batteries and 10 out of a planned 20 220w walk on marine solar panels on board and ready to be installed. The other 10 are on a ship somewhere and will be here soon, we are told.
The batteries increase our domestic storage capacity (excluding engine batteries) to 30 kw hrs. which is enough to power the boat for a couple of days. The PV array won't provide all of this, so we will still need to use the generator for some of the power. However the new lithium technology allows the battery bank to recharge much more quickly reducing the generator run significantly.
Before we can plug it all in we need to rebuild our upper deck to provide level and continuous support for the panels and adapt out battery cupboard to take the additional batteries and controllers. All of which has to be finished by the end of March! (Oh the joys of government funding cycles.)
This upgrade is the final stage of our current de carbonisation plans, which have included the installation of high levels of insulation, heat recovery ventilation, a water source heat pump and heat recovery from engine cooling.
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