I made a conscious decision during power system upgrade to have a single battery bank of 3x Firefly 100 amp hour batteries for both my house and starting needs on Grace. Space on any sailboat, including mine, is always limited. Adding a third battery, and upsizing them all on top of that, left little room for a dedicated starting battery. I had run Jammy this way for many years and had been much happier having the extra amp hours to use for house loads.
However this means that I could face the dreaded situation of having house loads deplete the bank enough that I could not start the engine. With my system, I have so much instrumentation – MasterVolt panel and alarms, Balmar panel and alarms, iKommunicate and SignalK monitoring, and displays at the nav table, on my phone, and of course alarms and displays at my MFD – that it would be unlikely that I wouldn’t know when we reached a critical point, and be able to take action.
Nevertheless, I believe in being prepared for every eventuality or emergency while on the water. Say, perhaps, silencing all of the alarms after a late night with cocktails, and falling asleep while the batteries happily discharge away to 0…
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