Power

I have tried to show the plan in diagrammatic form below.  The first drawing is what the ship has today.  It really relies on the generators to supply the ship all the time and the shore power only on the rare occasions it goes back to dock where no doubt they can supply the 100 amps it needs.

The 10 outputs from the Stroud gear allows us to control which fuse boards are powered.  Under normal circumstances its all on when the ship was on station.  No doubt only circuits turned off when being worked on.  But a useful facility.

The above diagram shows where I will need a solution.  Ideally I need one of the power assist type solutions that will allow the 16 amps from shore to be supplemented with extra battery power to take it to the peak level I need.  If I can get up to 64 amps somehow I can switch input power to either the domestic ccts, the engine room facilities (hoists, bilge etc) or the signals.  Each of the 10 outputs will be rewired to go to modern consumer units (4 for the domestic ccts). 

The diagram above looks to me like the way it would need to be done on the input shore power.  I can also feed into the inverter side wind and solar if I get it to boost the power available.  In this mode the shore power is ONLY ever used to charge batteries and the ships power always comes from them.  Then the capacity to power the ship is whatever the batteries and inverters can produce allowing me to decouple shore power input capability from power demands.  Obviously too much power drain will empty the batteries but this should not be a problem as overnight power usage will be very low.

The downside of this is batteries do not last many cycles and are expensive.  So maybe better to have another option which would allow me to detect power requirements and switch between shore power (direct feed) and battery power.  In theory, if I were to feed batteries via a grid tie inverter into the incoming shore power I would achieve a similar thing to the power assist function  i.e. it would boost the available power.  But this will require some further thinking.