The Shocking Truth About Electric Propulsion | Step 371 

Totally agree!

You guys know the old saying, "when you know the walk you can talk the talk". You guys have done it and experienced the pros and cons. Excellent work!@@warrendemars

Yes and I love how pretty much every sales person said “We are the market leader” LOL!!!

Absolutely, smashed it guys!!

thats exactly what I was seeing - welcome to the labyrinth

Dan and Kika have more experience than just about ANY salesperson out there...

“ you don’t cross the Atlantic every day “. Someone doesn’t watch their channel. No sometimes they coast off the coast of Norway instead.

Well these sellers are selling to maximum of people, that are definitely not having the use of Dan and Kika, thats not a surprised

Agreed surprising these people with his knowledge.

Ocean Volt may well be trying to be the best at what they do but come on, £27K for a motor for a 10 metre sailboat? You can actually buy a sailboat for that money. Or 6 diesel engines. Nothing can justify that sort of price.

Volume production is the only way to bring the prices of any of these systems down. They’re all still made by hand basically. With European labour costs.

It still doesn't make it any more affordable today. @@SailingUma would you guys have gone for it if you had to pay full price for it? I would have loved to install one, but the price just couldn't be justified.

As was said in the video, doing regen well in a boat is NOT just software like it is in a car. It requires different propellers and waterflow characteristics.

Oceanvolt's servoprop saildrive sounds terrific but in my case the extra $10K, over the Electric Yacht option with much lower regen performance, is far too much. I suspect the same will be true for most who cruise on a modest budget.

Would love to hear more about your set up as we couldn’t find ANYTHING on their website about test boats or sea trial numbers or regen tests.

@SailingUma Happy to share. ePropulsions does kinda bury the Performance Bulletins. At the very bottom of their homepage, under the Service heading is a link Performance Bulletin. We installed the Pod 3.0 Evo in our Beneteau 235. While regeneration was a consideration, for us it was more the quiet, and the lack of maintenance. My wife wanted to be able to single-hand the boat but didn't want to have to deal with a recalcitrant outboard. So we went electric and don't regret it at all. The complete system includes the Pod (3kw direct drive motor), motor controller, 4kw 48v battery, throttle, display and cabling. It was mostly a plug and play install. Drilling holes in the bottom of your hull is slightly unnerving the first time you do it, but after that it was pretty straightforward. As far as performance, we were delighted. 1kw (with a clean hull) would keep us at 5kn for about 4 hours. Since we use this boat primarily as a daysailer, and are rarely more than 10 miles from our home port, that was plenty of power to get us back if the wind completely died. Our max calculated range was about 25 miles with just the one 4kw battery. We never pushed it that far; we prefer to sail when possible. One thing I will say about their regen system is that it does work, but. For our use case, inland lakes with a boat that has a 22' waterline and a hull speed of just over 6kn, it didn't really do much. That may be due to the prop being optimized for thrust rather than regen. Oceanvolt definitely has the tech edge there. The most we saw was about 100w at around 5kn and usually more like 75w. But the ePropulsion regen chart (on their Pod page), made it clear that below 6kn you really weren't going to get much back. On a larger boat that can maintain say 7kn or 7.5 kn, and do that on a 200 mile passage, it would have more impact. Happy to answer any other questions, either here or offline. ​

couse that are just normal employes with no enthusiast in there profession

Be shure that they know, just not admiting it for various reasons :)

Yep

My experience with Fisher Panda hasn't been very good even after trying to contact a sales person or a manager, they never returned my emails.

We can generate more power than we can use currently on Uma when offshore sailing. Sailing at 5kts we break even, anything faster and we’re charging. Of course a boat that can average 10+ kts would be sweet. But we don’t have $1,000,000 just lying around burning a hole in our pocket.

@@SailingUma You still fire up your generator though, because your energy storage is depleted very quickly, when used for(very slow) propulsion. My point for a larger vessel is also about having significant space for lifepo4. Generating power through regen, is kind of moot, if you don't have the space to store it. Also, regen math doesn't really add up unless you're on long passages with great daily average kts, which one of the reps brought up. At the end of the day, you guys can do what you want, based on eco ideals. Everyone else though, has to live in the real world where none of us get free tech or significantly discounted tech because of a "channel". The cost in the real world is ridiculous, when compared to ICE tech, with way less practicality. I like the idea of hybrids. I like the idea of quiet anchoring and leaving marinas. General propulsion needs though, can't be seriously replaced with batteries that absolutely have to be switched out in X amount of years, at huge expense.

Charging in Winter really good and lithium battery's catch fire all the time

@@jimmunro4649 Quote you "catch fire all the time" Liar! Li-ion is not the only lithium battery technology out there. LiFePo4 (Lithium Iron Phosphate) is the type of battery used on leisure electric boats.

Don't overlook those combi guy's, they have a big used boat market

I priced a OV unit for my sailboat.... the price was eye watering.

@@thorpowell6571 They aren't cheap, but then, they are meant to last for the life of the boat and be a complete replacement for a diesel motor. Not to mention the diesel engine might be cheaper, but you have to constantly buy diesel which adds up. If you run out of diesel on the water, you're SOL. If the batteries on your boat die on the water, you can recharge as you sail through regeneration or solar.

Check out Electric Yacht. They don't offer the high performance servoprop, which sounds terrific, but the price is much lower for a KW equivalent saildrive. I haven't made a final decision for my 36' sloop yet but Electric Yacht is looking like the best option. $10K more, essentially for much better regen, is just too much for my budget.