AlastairW

Hot water heating as a dump load for solar or wind generation has been in use for some time. Great way of using surplus energy. Might need some additional control circuitry, how much would depend on your controller / inverter. Haven't done the sums on it, but with the present cost of PV panels from good suppliers, you could be looking at lower cost than an off the shelf solar water heating system. PV pricing is now less than a quarter of what it was six years ago.

Had a Nova for 7 years, and loved the boat. We sailed her up and down the East Coast of the South Island, no trouble. She's one of the best wee sea-boats I've sailed, handles heavy weather quite nicely - and we did overpress her a few times. We never felt as if she was going to let us down. "The Wet" is double diagonal planked with a glass skin, with a flush fore deck. Limited room inside, but great for working on at sea. Never found her performance lacking in lighter airs, but, with a 14HP Sole diesel she was certainly a bit underpowered. The experience with the Nova made me quite keen t

Too_tall Absolutely correct in every way. We went off grid because it was more cost effective in our particular situation. Although by my wife and I are environmentally aware, we went solar in the knowledge that the production of solar panels, associated electronics, and the batteries use huge amounts of resources to produce,and, when their useful life is over, leave some real nasties which have to be disposed of in some manner. Anyone who thinks they are doing it to help save the world needs to get a reality check. My belief is that as far as sustainability goes (and sustainability ha

Have been living completely off grid for the past 6 years. We live rurally. My background is in electronics/electrical systems, so I designed and built the system we use ourselves, and have done a bit of consulting for others looking to go off grid. For what it's worth, living in town, with power at the gate, it doesn't make financial sense to go off grid. It was going to cost $30k to get power to our house, I put in a complete system, including a large battery bank, for that. We designed and set up the house with off grid living in mind. We don't do without any of the normal comforts

Like you say, small things. We found a couple of similar things when recently purchasing, could have asked the vendor to rectify them, or started haggling about the price. In the end, the boat was what we wanted, and for us it was more important to have the goodwill of the vendor, so we just accepted there was a wee bit of work needed, and left it at that. At the end of the day, it's a very small percentage of the overall cost.

No, sorry, not Waiora, and I'm also impressed by the performance under just a headsail. F4 through the night in the BOP on a beam reach with just the yankee up and we averaged 6.5 knots over 10 hours. That's better than we could have done with the motor going. Then later on in the trip off the North Otago coast in a F2 under full sail and trochling along nicely at 4 kts on a close reach. From their appearance you'd not guess at that sort of performance, certainly look more like a Land Cruiser than a Lambourghini.

Have recently been through the same process as yourself, and ended up buying a Ganley Timerider. Very similar to the Pacemaker. We were being quite choosey and wanted something that didn't just stack up against our criteria, but felt right as well. Leaving aside all the issues of rust in hard to find places, which you have to take into account, and all the other personal preferences which you can change as you see fit, I've been quite impressed with ours. We've done a bit of mileage, bought her in the Bay of Islands and sailed her down to Dunedin in two hops at the start of the Winter.