Testing the Trimaran Upgrade of my Solar-Electric Boat

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:07]Good day. I'm testing the trian upgrade of my solar boat. In the previous week, I've been installing this very simple out triggers in order to increase the stability and also reducing the amount of balance needed to have a baseline of stability. currently testing it out and we are still rolling because the trian upgrade is not completed. We got a tiny 25 liters of buoyancy in each pontoon, but that alone is uh making the boat roughly 50% more stable. So, we have 50% less rolling and it's especially clear in anchor. Whenever I'm somewhere still, it's just not rolling. It It doesn't get that momentum. I can take a clip actually showing when I try to roll it by shifting my weight. I cannot get up the momentum. It simply doesn't roll.

[00:01:09]Obviously, it's a small boat and the width of the entire boat now is roughly 4 and 20. So, very narrow. And keep in mind that the pontoons are tiny. They are absolutely not what I wanted to have there, but I've been limited in both materials and tools being here in Spain.

[00:01:31]I've made several deliveries, but they simply don't show up. I get no message.

[00:01:37]It's something gets confused in the system because I put in a Finnish number, but they're still it's the correct number. They should call me.

[00:01:45]They should send me an email. They should do something, but I simply get nothing. It's kind of pissing me off.

[00:01:52]So, we ended up with something very primitive as the trian upgrade. Yet, it is working and it's mostly now important as a test.

[00:02:04]So, we have this extruded polystyrene and I'm going to add it on top of the pontoons to increase the buoyancy further, at least doubling it. Then, we should see even more stability increase.

[00:02:16]But then I'm also gonna use some of that foam to actually make a model of a triaran and a catamaran. Now based on my findings of kind of feeling it, seeing how it actually plays out, uh how much stability these absolutely tiny pontoons bring to my boat here. Uh it's a good promise and I might build a trian next.

[00:02:40]But we need to figure that out. I need to do more research. I like to test things out physically because then I'm not only looking at numbers, I'm literally holding it in my hand. So, do the pontoons make the boat slower? Yes and no. In calm conditions, we are actually faster because the pontoons are barely touching the water. And I reduced roughly 100 kilos of ballast from the boat. So we are a bit lighter in total which means that yeah we are faster or equally fast in calm conditions but when the waves get a bit higher obviously it's going to hit the arms the pontoons are going to be submerged sometime completely underneath the water because they are so small yet then we are a bit slower I still have to make some precise measurements as I don't have a reference currently The bottom of my boat is absolutely overgrown. I don't have any anti- fouling, but I do have good tools to clean it up. Once I've cleaned up the hole entirely, then I can compare to my previous top speed of the 7 and 1/2 knots roughly. Now I'm getting up to like 7 knots barely. the uh overgrowth is seriously slowing me down, especially on slow speeds. When the skin friction is more critical at lower speeds of four or five knots, I really have to crank up the throttle compared to having a cleaner hole. And then in very heavy weather, we're obviously going to be slower. I have not tried it yet and I think the arms of the pontoons are way too low currently as I didn't have so much freedom of choosing my setup. I would not build it that way if I had freedom of tools and materials. But I don't. I just do it with whatever I got access to. But as I said, it remains to be seen how much more buoyancy we can put onto the pontoons. also more than buoyancy actually the amount of flat surface. So as I put more of this uh foam on top of the pontoons the foam will be wider than the actual pontoon.

[00:05:01]So when the water hits that foam it's going to generate lift. And there's uh other ways to do it as well. Maybe I'm going to add some plank on the top. And whenever we're cruising, then if we hit a large wave and we got some speed, it will just uh stop the momentum immediately as it hits the flat surface.

[00:05:22]That is an option.

[00:05:26]So, I'm very impressed with the triangulating force. Uh it's actually more stable than a catamaran in certain conditions. A catamaran if you have the pontoons here it can kind of roll like that but a triaran works in a different way as the pontoons on the outside they are not intended to sink in deep so whenever the boat starts rolling it provides increasing amount of buoyancy and just um stops the rolling pretty much immediately that is something I've noticed here on a small scale as I mentioned when I try to make the boat uh it just stops the momentum immediately and even with these small pontoons we can see that effect and that made me a bit more interested in looking further into the triaran designs. I was talking about the swath design previously and there's a method you can actually apply that to a triaran then we have a swash design. So the central pontoon would be absolutely narrow sinking very deep but the outer pontoons are there only to provide stability. In that way you have the combination of the underwater pontoon in the center and the pontoons that dramatically increase in buoyancy as they are sunk deeper. The combination of buoyancy and sort of underwater torpedo could be highly efficient. So, I'm going to make a foam 3D model out of that. Super simple.

[00:07:01]Mainly to just see how it behaves in waves. And then I make a comparable PowerCat version of that also in foam and compare them side by side. I'm very excited to do that. I might do that in one of the next videos. But before that, we're going to finalize the current test here and test it out as much as we can.

[00:07:24]Also with a clean hole, I can show you the cleaning process of the hole. And then we can have some real numbers to compare like are we actually faster or can we sustain the same speeds with uh even the pontoons hitting the water and the arms being submerged sometime in larger waves. Thanks for watching this update of the Helios 11. We're going to take the solar vault as far as we can.

[00:07:53]Stay tuned to the channel by subscribing and then we're going to take it further to the next tests and eventually to the next model.