John's post brings to mind that we found a number of different shore plugs in Europe--in fact it seemed that every country was different.  We had a female 30 amp plug, with three wires on it, to accept what ever male shore plug we encountered.  Often we would have to test the socket to find out what part of the circuit was hot and what was ground.  We ran this thru the 3 kw step down transformer all of the time in Europe.  When we were back in North American waters, we just took the transformer out of the circuit, and went back to the old 110 volt system.

Bob Austin

I have the same thing, but with a female 50a 240/120v plug.  In fact I now
have two, one with wire sized for the full 50a load for the larger European
connectors, and one with wire sized for 20 amps for the smaller connectors,
as the large wires usually won't fit in the smaller connectors.

Hal

We had a female 30 amp plug, with three wires on it, to accept what ever
male shore plug we encountered.

Thanks for all the responses.

My plan is to power everything possible on DC and everything else on
Inverters.

Then I'll use a charger with universal power input to charge the battery
bank. One such charger is the Victron Centaur
http://www.victronenergy.com/upload/documents/Datasheet-UK-CentaurChrg.pdf .
The Centaur accepts 90 to 265 Volt input voltage range and either 50 Hz or
60 Hz. The 24/100 model provides 100 amps at 24 volts for a total of 2.4 KW.
Although the Centaur will not meet Portager's peak power requirements, the
battery bank will meet the peak power load and the battery charger will
exceed the average power load by a factor of four.

Since the Centaur runs off any power that that I know of, all I'll need is a
standard shore power cable and a box of adapters.

Regards;

Mike Schooley

Designing "Portager" a transportable Passagemaker

Mike,

What is your plan for charging underway. I assume we are talking a large battery bank.

Ron
----- Original Message -----
From: Mike Schooley

Thanks for all the responses.

My plan is to power everything possible on DC and everything else on Inverters.

Then I'll use a charger with universal power input to charge the battery bank. One such charger is the Victron Centaur http://www.victronenergy.com/upload/documents/Datasheet-UK-CentaurChrg.pdf . The Centaur accepts 90 to 265 Volt input voltage range and either 50 Hz or 60 Hz. The 24/100 model provides 100 amps at 24 volts for a total of 2.4 KW. Although the Centaur will not meet Portager's peak power requirements, the battery bank will meet the peak power load and the battery charger will exceed the average power load by a factor of four.