Moving on and starting over

Eventually, the summer had ended, but my ambitious plans were far from being over.

In November I took a huge step and bought my own floating home on the East side of lake Union, Seattle (WA). It was time to move from one floating home to another and of course, I used The Taxi (Sailboat) to transport ALL my belongings, including the furniture!

I barely had time to unpack because in early December I traveled to Portugal to spend Christmas season with my family. I stayed in Portugal until mid February due to a variety of factors: COVID-19 Travel restrictions meet the wonders of remote work.

In Portugal I experienced lockdown from a very different perspective - there was no lake and no boat parked outside that I could use to escape to Freedom. But there were still opportunities to be creative and to learn something new!

The boat needed a set of cushions to make the ride more comfortable on the cockpit as well as to make a cozy bed inside on the v-berth.

This wasn't an easy project and I was only able to complete it successfully because I had help from several people along the various stages of the process! In the end, I think that the cushions look great and I can confirm that they fit perfectly into The Taxi.

Back in Seattle, I used the remaining Winter months and the Spring to settle into the new home. Inevitably I had different woodwork projects to do around the house: My bathroom needed some restauration, and I had to build new pieces of indoor and outdoor furniture. (Projects to cover in a future article perhaps).

While I was working on those other projects, I took the opportunity to restore all the wood trim all around the boat. Here are some examples:

What about the electricity?

Amidst all that I continued to learn and think about electricity.

The first battery bank that I had built with lead-acid batteries was able to power my electric motor, lights, etc, but only for about 3 hours. By creating a system that could easily alternate between 48V and 24V, I could use the 24V fast charger to charge up relatively quickly, but that still meant that I had to be able to connect to a power outlet somewhere.

To complete my original vision, the next logical step should be adding a clean & infinite source of energy to my setup. In practice that meant that I would need to build a stainless steel arch that could accommodate an array of solar panels. However, I had a problem that was becoming harder and harder to ignore... WEIGHT! The 8 led acid batteries that I was using were (very) heavy and due to their size I had placed them in a storage compartment. This location was out of sight, but it was also slightly towards the back of the boat and that created weight distribution problems, especially in the days when I had several passengers on board.

I started to realize that I might have to review my original plan and take a completely different approach in order to solve these weight problems.

Can I make my own battery?

I had reached a technical bottleneck with my original experiment: The power to weight ratio of the lead-acid batteries that I had chosen was not good enough for my intended application.?

Sometimes we need to have the courage to start over.

So I decided to tackle this puzzle in a different way by changing the course of my project entirely. If I couldn't afford the weight that the solar panels would require, then I would have to increase my battery capacity to a point where that wouldn't matter as much. As I would learn later, I could even leverage new technologies to considerably reduce the weight of my battery bank while also increasing my overall capacity.

My curiosity was now leading me down the path of learning how to make my own battery. As you may have noticed, the world is on a journey towards the electrification of everything. New types of battery cells, with various sizes, shapes and capacities, have recently become widely available to all of us and these can be put together to create custom batteries capable of meeting all sorts of requirements.

I had my formula, and I knew that it worked: By allowing my curiosity to guide my learning I can learn (and do) anything. So I continued to ask myself important questions and pursuing their answers:

Which type of battery cells could be more appropriate for my use case? What sort of cells are used to build a Tesla anyway? What sort of components would I need in order to build a battery that is safe as well as powerful?

After researching a variety of options, I finally decided that I would build my own battery using Lithium Iron Phosphate (LifePO4) cells. These are much lighter and much more capable than lead acid batteries. In my new design, I would connect 16 of these cells with a capacity of 280 Amp/H in a series configuration (16S) in order to make a 48v battery. I would have about 400% more usable capacity for 1/4 of the weight.

Back to the drawing board!

Click the link below and read my next article. Find out how I have built a new and improved version of The Taxi by using Lithium Iron Phosphate cells to make a 48V battery.

Chapter 4: "You can reach as high as you dare trying"