Dan

Ken and Adam, thanks very much for your insightful responses. Adam -- I'll take a look at my battery chargers and see if supplementing them makes sense, which it might just. I have some positive experience with this sort of thing (shore->chgr->inverter->appliances) in the motorhome world, although one needs to be careful with cable sizes. Ken - you ask about inverter capacity. My boat came with a 4KW Xantrex SW4024 inverter. If necessary, I believe I can pair these to generate 240v. But the best suggestion you had for me was to check my appliances to see whether they can run on 50hz. Even though I'm not on the boat, I was able to use Seakits (which my boat came with) to check all the manuals. Ken, as you suspected, almost everything can apparently tolerate 50hz/60hz. I've got CruisAir chilled water air conditioning on the boat, and the air handlers, controls, pumps, and relays, all don't care about the frequency. The tempering units said "60Hz only", but I will call CruisAir by phone to confirm. I'm not sure what in the tempering units might be sensitive, but will find out. I'm not so lucky with the washer/dryer and oven. Still, I can isolate their zones (the builder seems to have done a rational job of zoning the electrical panel, and allowing me to choose the source of each zone) and run the genset for an hour or two for that kind of thing. The biggest item I was concerned about was the air conditioning, which in certain climates needs to run non-stop. The boat came with a Charles Industries battery charger in addition to the Xantrex inverter. The charger says its good with 50/60 Hz, and puts out 30A at 24V -- perhaps enough to keep the batteries charged, although I'll need to spend a little more time paying attention to that before coming to a final conclusion. While I do have an electric stove, and it says 60Hz only (probably for the controls), I'm contemplating replacing it with an inductive one (still electric, but with the controllability of gas). I have a portable inductive unit on the boat now, and it heats very fast while not drawing very much power (runs off the inverter easily). Bottom line: Thanks to both of you for the suggestions of A) having a non-inverter source of charging, B) checking to see whether my equipment works with 50Hz already (most of it does), and C) thinking carefully about the overall draw. While I was originally thinking about an Atlas or similar, perhaps I was trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist, or at least exists in such a way that it is already manageable. Ken -- I read that you have an Atlas on your boat. Has it proven useful as you've roamed the globe? Dan