By William L. Hensley
Take a small boat like mine and add a radiotelephone, a spotlight, a cabin fan, an electric bilge pump, a depth finder, a few extra cabin lights, and you’ve got a problem: where to get the electricity to run them all. Sure, my boat’s engine has a conventional generator/storage-battery electrical system, but that was designed, primarily, to power standard electrical gear and supply current to the starter motor. It just can’t supply enough juice to keep all my electrical auxiliaries purring happily. Solutions? Two are obvious: Add an independent battery to power part of the equipment. The hitch here, of course, is that this battery must be carried ashore frequently for recharging. Or the existing electrical system must be beefed up by substituting a heftier generator, or—better yet—an alternator. But this is only a partial fix, since the improvement is effective only when the boat’s engine is running. Switch off the engine, and we are back where we started. The best solution (and the one I finally settled on) is to install a ship’s-generator system, driven by a small auxiliary engine. The unusual thing about mine (seen in the pictures), is that I built it myself mostly out of junk parts.
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