You're not sailing with a 5 year old, we are. I am also not sailing with my grand father, who was an energy scrooge, something I vowed not to be on our boat.. We, my wife and I, don't watch the TV just our daughter and I am not going to give my 5 year old my laptop to watch a movie on. The iPad is enough for a 5 year old... Gotta keep the kids & family happy as a happy kids & wife means happy cruising. We often cruise with other couples with kids and you'd be amazed how tired the kids are after kayaking and rowing around the bay. We fire up the TV and let them watch a movie and it gets really, really quiet and the adults get to have a nice enjoyable cocktail hour, for us the TV has merit and helps us avoid the "witching hour"..... We never had a TV on a boat, until we had a kid....

We use 20-40Ah's /day which is far less than the 100-200Ah's / day many folks use. Could we use less? Sure, but why, when we don't need to run the engine except for more than about an hour per day for the Sea Frost. Unless we drop our bank into bulk we get very little gain from the alt so solar is taking care of most of the 12V. We also have a HUGE ice box. Despite being extremely well insulated we still need 45 minutes to an hour per day of engine running to chill the holding plate. When we go off cruising we also carry enough food for the entire trip. Our ice box is large enough to do so and we'd never go back to a tiny one again. My wife loves to cook and for us this means a very full ice box..

Most of my customers boats burn 50-120 Ah's per day in refrigeration and or freezer alone. The lightest refrigeration use I have seen is a customer with a very customized Saga 43. He has 7" of custom vacuum panels in the ice box. He still burns 25-40Ah on just the 12V refrigeration and that is the most efficient "installed" 12V box I have come across. I also have a customer with a Caliber and Frigoboat system that is very, very well insulated but again he is still over 40Ah's / day..

I am stunned that you can use just 12Ah in 24 hours with only 8Ah's (2/3 of that) for 12V refrigeration. How are you measuring the Ah draw on the fridge? What is it? Even keel cooled or RWC units from Frigoboat and SeaFrost burn waaaaaaaay more than that. My customer with a very, very teeny tiny well insulated Engle self contained unit still burns over 25Ah's per day for the 12V refrigeration. I just installed 280 watts of solar so he's now ahead of it with plenty of extra..

Perhaps you've stumbled onto some way to refrigerate your food on 8 Ah's per day...? Please let us know how you keep your food below 40F on just 8Ah's per day. I'd love to have that system. I have worked very closely with Cleve of Sea Frost on our system and it is darn efficient but is engine driven.. For now I am pretty happy with what we have and can use and our ability to replenish it without disturbing the anchorage.

If I want to be a miser we can get down to 12Ah's per day pretty easily but we don't need to.. On our recent cruise we were back to 100% SOC on 5 out of the 12 days. Most days we were hoovering in the mid to high 90's as percent of charge and by morning we'd be back down to 90% or so..