All right so here I am in my boat, it's a little bit older,
it's a little dirty right now. I usually keep it a little cleaner than this but I'm not here to clean
it today. I'm here to make sure that it stays dry. So the issue with this is that I have this
old cover on it and there's a couple leaks. It's not too bad but the biggest issue is that up here
right where the the cover bolts, or clips on underneath the windshield.
Sometimes some water drips down here and if you get an extended period of rain it can really
accumulate on on the floor. And you can see that by a little bit of the mildew that's grown that's
shown up there, so I have to clean that up still. But that that showed to me that, look we have an
issue here. And then I'd put my hand here and it'd be rather moist, and it would be damp even even on
extended periods of hot days. So there wasn't a lot of airflow coming through this
this cover, even when I would leave some of the flaps open like that to try to encourage
some some airflow so it could dry out. It wasn't enough. So what I've done is built a solar powered
ventilation system. So I started off with this I guess this is tin or aluminum hose that you
can just get at any hardware store. You could use a dryer hose you could use anything along
those lines I used this one because it's a little bit firm, it can kind of hold its
hold its position in there. Once I zip it all up and I have that leading down
all the way down to here where I've bolted on a computer fan. This is just a basic PC fan I think
this is a four inch fan. And I have it bolted on here now I had bought a smaller fan when we went
to go do this and it actually fell in the water, so we used this as the spare. It's working fine
obviously the size difference is a little a little off as you can see, but it still works. And what
we've done is we've just zip tied this onto the pipe, or the the tubing here. And it's held in
place pretty strong, and I just let that kind of sit near the ground where... Again here is
really where where the moisture is building up. So it pulls air through the tubing and the air
has to come through here, so it it forces the air to come through this area and dry out. And now,
for the first time in the season, it's bone dry on here! So I can finally clean this up and get this
get this cleaned up nicely. So to power it, it's really simple. I've just taken... There's actually
four cables that come on this thing. But two are for power the other for control, and we don't
need those, so I clipped those off. And these two power, I just have them coming all the way up here
to a solar panel. And I bought this at Canadian Tire for 30 bucks! 10 watt solar panel,
and I just have this sitting here on the dashboard right in front of the window, and it's... Even on
a cloudy day, like it is cloudy today, and it's only got a little bit of light hitting the the
solar array here. But doesn't matter, because it's still enough to spin it and that's all you
need you just need a small amount of power just to get some airflow. And this is all you need to do,
and it keeps everything dry. And yeah, so it's pretty simple you just wire the the negative
and positive to the wires on the back of the solar panel. You know, I just twisted
them together with some electrical tape and that's "Bam!", all you need to do. And now my
floor of my boat will finally stay dry, and I will clean up this gross nasty stuff now.
And I'm really happy that I can finally do that. Hope this helps, also gives you an
idea. The whole project cost me... This was, you know, this was six bucks or maybe seven bucks,
this was eleven, and the solar panel was thirty. So we're... We've got a ventilation system for
the boat, that keeps moisture down and keeps your boat in good shape, for under 50 bucks! I
think it's worth it. Hope this helps, if you have any questions leave them in the comments below.