The spot.
Well come Sat. morning and everyone bailed out on me, heading off on their own adventures so I decided to launch Ruby on my own. A bit miffed I must admit.
Launching was a piece of cake, although I did lose a bunky board off the trailer. This was inevitable as I had noticed how rotted the lag bolts and holes were when I reconfigured the trailer to hold the pontoons about 6" further apart. I probably should have replaced them then but they seemed like they still had some life in them. Oh well, I retrieved the bunky board and lashed it back on for now.
I decided to power right over to the Amazon, a river siding across the river and behind on of the islands that goes for about a half mile and ends at a mill pond. It has a very slow current and is wildly overgrown with lots of wildlife so we call it the Amazon. I just wanted to tie off somewhere, have a beer and try to over come my anger at the state of irresponsible teens these days.
Later I got a call from Licia saying that she and my son Sasha were down at the Polk street boat launch (I launched about a couple miles further up river at the Crystal Lake launch) so I headed down river to meet up with them.
Re-Generation test
Before picking them up I tied off at the OSU rowing team docks across the river. I backed Ruby down to the furthest point up river on the dock so the paddlewheel would have unobstructed access to the river current for re-generation.
I was just able to get about 1 amp of re-gen sporadically. Disappointing to say the least.
I actually suspected this might be the case as when I tried turning the wheel by hand back at home it had quite a bit of resistance.
Now this spot on the river does not have particularly strong currents however it probably does represent an average for easily accessible end-tie dock space so it is relevant.
We pulled Ruby out into the rapid current at our overnight spot and were able to get 3 to 5 amps which is 200 to 300 watts so.... nothing to sneeze at. Ultimately I am confidant we can get somewhere between 500 to 1000 watts which will re-charge the battery bank over night as planned.
I had already decided to add 2.5" to the width of the buckets (paddles) and have the parts mostly fabricated but I still don't believe that that will make a significant improvement for re-gen.
I believe that what I have done in choosing the motor system and designing the gearbox is create a fantastically efficient POWERING vessel but this efficiency comes at the expense of very poor re-gen performance. Rather than compromising the powering performance for better re-gen I decided that I would redesign the gearbox with parallel sheaves to bring the gear ratio from 75 to 1, as it is now for powering, to just 3 to 1 for re-gen or 1 to three as that is more accurate when in re-gen mode. So for every rotation of the wheel the E-motor will turn about three times. I have the sheaves to play with this a bit to go up to 1 to 15 as long as that doesn't create too much resistance, defeating the purpose.
Obviously with a standalone EverGen unit it would be optimized for GENERATION only with the same fantastic efficiencies Ruby is getting with powering.
Back to the River.
So I picked up the Fam and we headed back up river.
Ruby moves along pretty good as long as we stay on the sides of the river out of the main current. In the main current Ruby only makes a couple knots over the bottom and there are some spots in the narrows where she pretty much sits still or just inches along. I firmly believe that adding to the buckets will improve performance a good bit. We certainly have ample power under the hood.
Ruby's paddlewheel will start "spooling" (digging a hole in the water) at about 3000 rpm which is right about 6 knots speed I believe. Going up river we were burning in the neighborhood of 15 to 30 amps, 30 amps being max in max river current before the wheel spools. Still very good performance and about a third of what I was estimating during design.
Drawing only 10 or 12" allows Ruby to play the slow waters and eddie currents way on the sides of the river. It's a bit spooky powering along at a good clip in such a big boat and being able to see the rocks on the bottom of the river just 16" or so deep.
We played up and down the river for a while then I dropped the Fam off and went to find a spot to tie off and take a nap.
Later on that afternoon Licia came back and I meet her at the dock to load up on all the over night stuff. We powered around a while until we found a perfect spot behind an island on the bank in the lee of a spit of land that deflected the current. It formed an ideal little stillwater cove just deep enough to dive in off the boat.
I tied off the bow to a couple of trees on shore and we went for a dip. If you swim out a little ways you get into the current and swimming as hard as I could freestyle I could just stay in place. It was a good workout. All you had to do is turn a bit to the left and you would drop out of the current and could stand on the bottom just fine.
We had a fantastic steak dinner, drank some wine, and watched the sunset with all the wildlife around us.
After an uneventful night (very comfortable) we had breakfast then headed off to find a nice sunny beach somewhere.
We powered up river another couple miles and nosed in to a slow water spot on a huge sunny gravel beach where we swam, ate, napped, drank, and other things....
That afternoon we powered another couple miles up river then turned around and headed back to the boat launch, hauled out and went back home. Again everything worked well. I'm really anxious to add to the buckets to gain a little more power in the stronger current section of the river but other than that I am very happy with Ruby.
