Time For Some Careful Planning...

Although it's tempting to just crack on with the work that needs to be done, it's become really important to take some time out to plan in detail exactly what we're going to do over the next few weeks. It's relatively easy to take things out but now we're faced with having to start to put back things into the boat, we want it to all work ok and need to keep the cost down. The two major areas to be refitted are the nav area and the galley, to get these right the wiring and the plumbing have to be thought through and planned out.

I've defined two almost equally demanding scenarios to size up the electrics, a couple of summer nights at anchor and a long night passage. We're not keen on starting up the engine too often at anchor so the battery capacity needs to be enough to keep the power hungry fridge working which is pretty demanding although the other loads still add up too. It all comes to 100 ampere/hours which is much the same as the other scenario, sailing across the channel with navigation lights and all the electronics on. I've learned from bitter experience that you don't discharge even deep cycle batteries more that 50% if you want them to last so that means we need 200 amp/hours of capacity but originally there was only one 110amp/hr domestic battery and a smaller starting battery. There isn't room under the pilot berth for a second one so the solution is to locate another in the forepeak which will be useful to power the anchor winch which is close by.

Having sorted this out the rest of the design is straight forward although a bit tedious as i've had to convert all the wiring diagrams from a PC (Visio) to a Mac (Omnigraffle). I'll be using the same Blue Sea kit from Merlin that proved to be so reliable on Alize. It's a bit of a jigsaw puzzle to find enough space to mount the control panel, Plotter, VHF and Tank Tender on the woodwork adjacent to the chart table but it proves to be possible without loosing what was the bookcase. I'm rather keen on keeping this for all the wiring and fuses with a hinged lid to cover it making it all very accessible, especially if something goes wrong! With detailed drawings made we can get the chippy started on filling in the holes and recovering what is currently a very sad part of the interior.

The main constraint on the galley is the distance between the refrigeration unit and the cold plate. We're going to have to have a cold box fabricated from GRP to fit which dictates the size of the cold plate (the smallest we can get), I'm hoping to be able to locate the compressor in the sail locker but it will have to go aft of the fuel tank if we're to fit the calorifier     in the convenient spot in front of the tank. This means there's no space for the heater so that's going to have to go at the aft end of the pilot berth after all. It's yet another jigsaw puzzle to resolve and one that I don't want to get wrong! Fortunately there seems to be sufficient space for the piping and wiring runs even though the hull is never far away limiting space at various pinch points.

Now we've agreed on all the parts needed and got some quotes for the work I cant do myself it's time to update the budget spreadsheet. Naturally the bottom line is more than we'd like to spend so there's going to have to be a round of cost trimming which all takes so much time....