Sailing Holly Blue

Hi all! We’re Sailing Holly Blue—Ross, Laura, Josh, and Noah—a liveaboard YouTubing Sailing family of four (six if you include the cats!) living on the Greek Islands. We share and document our adventures and lifestyle through our social media and episodes on YouTube in the hope of entertaining followers and inspiring those who want to live their dreams of a traveling lifestyle.

 

We’ve had our Super B LiFePO4 batteries for almost 18 months now… which has given us adequate time to reflect on and evaluate their performance and lifestyle enhancement in the extremes of the seasons here in the med.

 

But let’s rewind a little..if you don’t already know, we have been living onboard Holly Blue for coming up to 6 years now.  When we purchased her, we inherited old lead acid lorry batteries as our house bank!  Ross changed these straight away to Bosch sealed lead acid batteries… This was fine for weekend recreational use whilst using only the basic Bavaria navigational equipment onboard. 

 

However, after sailing Holly Blue over 3000 nautical miles from the UK to Greece and moving on board full-time, it quickly became apparent that our needs demanded more power. 

 

We suddenly had a family to school & businesses to run.  Needless to say, we pretty much destroyed these batteries within our first year of use - this was because we were forced to discharge past 50% batteries regularly.  As you may know, this significantly reduces the life of sealed or AGM batteries. 

 

In our second year, we upgraded to 660Ah and the best AGM batteries available. By living very frugally, we managed to keep discharge below 50%. These batteries lasted two years, when the capacity dropped to 80%, giving us less available power.  

 

Ross finally felt that after having had three different lead-based battery banks in the space of three years—with quite frankly very minimal performance—it was time to upgrade to the Super B Nomada LiFePO4 batteries.

 

Once installation was complete (which in itself was a smooth process due to Super B’s Technical Team support), not only did we get 840AH of capacity in the space we had available, but it also worked out to be less than half the weight!  For normal recommended everyday use, you can use 85% of this capacity - this works out as over double the usable capacity in comparison to what we had before!

 

As a result, this has provided us with the full freedom to live our onboard lifestyle our own way…in addition to everything we needed before, we can now also run the following:

 

High power watermaker

2.4kw multifunction air frying oven

Water heater

2kw electric kettle

2 extra laptops

Starlink

High pressure washer

Scuba diving compressor 

2 aft cabin TV’s

3 heated blankets….

 

…and that’s not the half of it!

 

All in all, these batteries have opened the door to so many lifestyle opportunities and freedom of living, which has had a huge impact on our experience as a whole onboard. The less there is to think about, the more time you have to look around and enjoy the life you have worked so hard to create.

 

The amazing thing is also that these batteries are guaranteed to give 3,500 cycles at 100% discharge…this in reality (based on the above appliance use - rarely going below 50% discharge) means our Super B Batteries are likely to last us over 20 years.

 

If you were only sailing throughout the summer season and using them the same way you could easily double this number.

 

In a nutshell, choosing to upgrade to Super B batteries means fitting and forgetting about them…one less boat job to consider. Always a bonus!

 

Follow Sailing Holly Blue on Instagram and YouTube.