The need/want conundrum and enough juice to power a village...

A little father and son goodness, a daughter's tale, and, apparently, the sons and daughters of the rich and famous in China are not unlike their American counterparts...

Well, now that Mr Generator is purring away like a happy kitten, I have power tools that work and life is good... Do I hear an AMEN?

Speaking of things generator related makes me think of one of the big mistakes I made on the whole power-grid-on-a-boat thing and it has to do with inverters... I ignored the need/want directive.

Like a lot of American boatfolk, the whole bigger is better mindset is hard to avoid and looking at my previous electrical installation and others on friends' boats the proof is there for all to see. The thing is: do we actually need so much power?

For instance, like a lot of cruisers, I used to have a big inverter/charger sized to be able to run any of my power tools (or a small village) and it would appear a lot of folk use the same logic. The problem is the first time I plugged my circular saw into the inverter and saw the hellacious power drain on my batteries (your amp meter is there for a reason) the logic flew right out the window. The end result was that, in point of fact, that big expensive 2500 watt inverter/charger mostly wound up powering my iPod charger, a hand blender, or other less than 200 watt appliances. Not exactly a good fit now was it?

Made worse of course, because that big Xantrex inverter used a lot of power on its own, being akin to a Bram Stoker character of the electrical world and, as you'd expect, being Xantrex, it kinda sucked...

It also took up a lot of room and had sharp edges so being mounted on the bulkhead of the port quarter berth I'd find myself doing myself damage whenever I needed to access storage in the quarter berth area... Let me tell you, those deep scalp wounds really bleed!

Not content with simply sucking the batteries dry of life, or necessitating getting out the suture kit on a regular basis, the real problem with the too big inverter was the hum from hell which sounded like one of those fiendish machines from the "Bride of Frankenstein"... Actually, considering the whole Xantrex vibe, I wouldn't be surprised if most of their designs are based on leftover props from "BoF".

Now that we on "So It Goes" live in a happy Xantrex-free world, we have a small 600 watt inverter (well, two actually as they were so cheap, under $50, we thought why not have a spare) which runs all of our computers, various electronic needful things/toys, my hand blender and various small tools. It's mounted underneath a shelf so is frugal of precious small boat space, does not suck excess power, and has yet to open a wound that required stitches or involved arterial bleeding...

It does, though, have just that tiniest little fiendish hum...

Listening to Don Bern

So it goes...