Shore Power Hook-Ups

Peter C writes…

This item is about Hook-Ups for electricity at marinas. You don’t have to be over 18 to read on.

Recent sailing trips have included interim stop overs at marinas around the Solent. In two cases, the cost of the mooring has excluded electricity and in order to get power from the socket on the pontoon it has been necessary to download an App (yes, another one).

Ocean Village

At Ocean Village, Southampton, the pontoons and marina bills are all dealt with online and the electricity controlled via portal.meter-macs.com. You will find it necessary to create an account with your email and a password and supply a credit card number for billing and a deposit amount. The advantage, yes there is one, is that you only pay for the electricity you use rather than a fixed £4 or £5 or £8 in Cowes! The disadvantage is that the rate per kWh may change at any time. 

We found that we used ‘only’ 50p worth overnight and could actually recover the surplus deposit back to the credit card on departure, big tick. You can, of course, leave money on the account for your next visit. I assume it will work at any marina that uses the same supplier portal. Ocean Village is part of MDL.

Yarmouth

At Yarmouth, a similar process is required but the App is called BerthVend (https://app.berthvend.com) and is run by a UK company who install the pontoon hardware and control the cloud based charging service.

Also appearing are high power pontoon based charging points that look like EV chargers. Electric power boats may soon be sailing into a marina near you.

Note: To save you looking it up, you probably pay about 60p daily standing charge for your home account and currently 24p per kWh but who knows for how long!