{"id":19587,"date":"2020-03-26T10:20:15","date_gmt":"2020-03-26T08:20:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.victronenergy.com\/blog\/?p=19587"},"modified":"2025-04-21T16:15:23","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T14:15:23","slug":"sailing-uma-off-grid-energy-usage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.victronenergy.com\/blog\/2020\/03\/26\/sailing-uma-off-grid-energy-usage\/","title":{"rendered":"Sailing Uma: Off-grid energy usage"},"content":{"rendered":"

With 156,000 subscribers, the Sailing Uma YouTube channel is a fun and educational resource for voyaging sailors – particularly those on a budget that do their best to avoid marinas.<\/p>\n

Doing so means living primarily off-grid using the power of the sun for Uma’s principal energy needs. No mean feat when you consider Uma has an electric motor for auxiliary propulsion, rather than diesel.<\/p>\n

Uma<\/h3>\n

Uma is a 1972 Pearson 36. As her webpage says: “She is neither fancy and expensive, nor cheap and flimsy\u2014to us, she is perfect. We wanted a name that carried with it the motivation and rational that led us to buy her in the first place. Her name was inspired by the Portuguese number 1 (uma), meaning first or primary.”<\/p>\n

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Electricity needs<\/h3>\n

Personally I’ve been following this adventurous couple ever since they first got Uma and started converting her to electric propulsion. My interest was to see how others do it, having converted in much the same way to auxiliary electric propulsion some 7 years ago myself – and having discovered just how hungry power needs onboard can be, when considering generation of electricity, storing the resulting energy and managing the use of that power.<\/p>\n

My own electric journey with Sailing Yacht Elektra is linked from my personal webpage, along with a little about myself:<\/p>\n