Marine Solar - A Practical Engineering Guide

Most marine solar installations underperform for reasons that have nothing to do with the panels.

Shading from the rig, heat derate, undersized conductors, and a charge profile that quietly starves the battery bank - these are engineering problems, and Marine Solar gives you the engineering answers: a measured power budget, honest derates for real sailing conditions, and a nine-step installation walkthrough that ends in a system you actually understand.

This is not a rooftop-solar book with boat photos stapled on. Every calculation, wire table, and mounting detail in this guide assumes what a boat actually does: it heels, it shades itself with its own rig, it gets hot, and it has no grid to fall back on.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

• Daily power-budget worksheets, built circuit by circuit
• Honest array sizing with real-world derate factors - not laboratory numbers
• PWM vs. MPPT compared on the actual numbers, not marketing claims
• LiFePO4, AGM, and flooded lead-acid battery banks: capacity, acceptance, and life
• Wire gauge and voltage-drop tables for 12V and 24V systems
• A fully illustrated nine-step installation walkthrough, in the order it must happen
• Galvanic corrosion, stray current, and lightning protection
• Commissioning checklists and a fault tree that turns "the solar isn't working" into a diagnosis in twenty minutes
• Fillable worksheets, reference tables, and a glossary - Appendices A through D

• A 30 ft coastal cruiser on weekends and shore power
• A 40 ft liveaboard running solar-primary, full time
• A 46 ft ocean passagemaker with no shore power for months