FRANK MUMMERTKen stretches out and watches television, but the computer and the stereo are off.
Suzanne wanted to know what the problem was. I explained that there wasn't a problem exactly, just that the air conditioner seemed to draw "a lot of amps."
THE 30-AMP CONVERSATION
"What," she asked, "is a lot?" So I told her. She looked at me quizzically. Ten amps was not a lot – our smallest breaker at the Richmond house was 15 amps – and she knew that we had had several 50-amp breakers.
"Just how many amps does the boat use?" she asked.
"Well, the boat doesn't really use any amps, technically," I dodged.
"OK, how many amps do we use?"
"That depends on what we're running now, doesn't it?" I parried.
"How many amps can we use, all at the same time?" she said, her tone icy.
I was caught.
"Thirty," I said. She looked at me with horror.
"So, the air conditioner, running by itself," she ventured.
"Takes about a third of everything," I said, finishing her sentence.
"Well," she said, sitting down carefully on the new settee cushions. "We'll just have to be careful, won't we? We'll have to make sure we turn off things we aren't using."
The noise from the forward V-berth caused each of us to look up. The sound from the television was competing with the noise from a laptop video game for Ken's attention. And both were lost on him, drown out by his stereo headphones. We faced each other, swallowed, and went to tell him of the new world order.
A BRAVE NEW WORLD
All in all, it wasn't bad. The summer faded into fall, the Cruisair faded into oblivion, and the need for air conditioning disappeared. Heat became the new issue.
Although the boat was fitted with a Force 10 propane heater, it was never fitted for propane tanks, so electricity was still our preferred heating system. Luckily, the Mermaid unit in the aft cabin turned out to be a reverse-cycle unit with forced heat, and West Marine put a nifty cabin heater on sale before it got too cold. In addition, the flat griddle and the toaster oven we bought to temporarily replace the completely broken oven and stove provided a fair amount of heat when they were on. The problem became one of balancing the load.
