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Old 10-03-2012, 11:01 AM   #10
Aquabelle
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City: East Coast, Australia
Join Date: Jun 2012
Posts: 935
This decision should be driven primarily by considering first your electrical needs. If you are not intending AC-powered air-con (or are happy to only use this when on shorepower), then I am with FF at post #5: get a DC genset of 100-200A output and a quality inverter/charger. If you plan air-con and you want to be able to run it at anchor, often, then 1500 (50hz) or 1800 (60hz) diesel gensets are generally preferred for noise and longevity over high-rpm gensets. But if your air-con use at anchor is modest/occassional and you have good alternators and a quality inverter/charger, the high-rpm gensets can be a very cost-effective approach. MasterVolt & Victron (& perhaps others?) make inverter/chargers that can be parallel'd with gensets. This allows for a significant down-sizing of the genset, as the momentary power surges associated with starting motor loads (as experienced with air-con) can be handled by the inverter supplementing the genset and the genset itself can be sized to just cope with the more typical running loads. In my own case, this allowed down-sizing from a 13kva to a 7.5kva genset...big difference in cost, weight, noise, etc.
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