How much power?

But when you are not connected to an apparently unlimited supply of power (let’s say just a few hundred amp-hours of power), you quickly realise how precious it is and how careful you have to be.

When we bought SV Sauvage, she had her ‘original’ three lead-acid house batteries, each at 100 amp-hours (Ah), plus a dedicated battery for the engine. That meant we had 300Ah for running the internal filament lights, GPS, depth finder, windlass anchor, isotherm fridge and freezer, radio, and anchor light on the mast at night.

To get around the issue of having to start the motor to get more power into the house batteries, previous owners had installed a very small