Good Decision on Boat Rooftop Air Conditioner/Generator Install

I've got a 40 year old 28' houseboat that requires air conditioning both on the water and on the road. It came with rooftop air but no generator. I talked about putting a Honda 3000i generator on the roof of the boat to power the air conditioner and other conveniences.

I got a lot of flack about putting so much generator weight on the roof of the houseboat. That's a couple hundred pounds about 8 feet above the waterline (and ~10 feet high on the trailer). Those folks were worried about geometry and stability underway while I was only worried about comfort on the water. The generator was going on the roof.

I've had boats for over 40 years and I'm no dummy so I knew there would be consequences of putting weight that far above the waterline. When we were living on the sailboat (for 3 years) we understood that for every ounce aloft, one needed a pound of ballast. The brochures for our old houseboat even warned about too many of the crew on the roof at one time. But like I said, "The generator was going on the roof!" And it did.

The generator is just in front of the air conditioner

But the way the generator was installed turned out to have an unexpected benefit. The base that the generator sits on is firmly attached to the roof of the boat. Here you can see the base and the cover.

The base is upside down in the pic. The holes in the base are for wire feeds.

 

I put doorstops between the base and the boat's roof.

The base is bolted to the roof of the boat. More on that here:
http://72land-n-sea.blogspot.com/2011/07/monumental-achievemant.html

The generator just sits on the base. The cover slides over the generator and down over the base. This way the cover and generator have no attachment to the roof. The tight fit of the cover over the generator and a similar tight fit of the cover over the base allows gravity to keep everything in place. The thought here was that if the boat did become unstable to the point of almost rolling, the generator would be sacrificed overboard to help with the righting moment.

Well, we've never tested the sacrificing principal but when exiting a gas station at Tickaboo I was careful to clear the overhanging branches with the van, but the boat cut the corner significantly closer and a stout limb caught the generator cover. The cover was knocked back about 45° while pushing the generator off the base by several inches. If either of these two units had been fixed to the roof there would have been major damage to the boat, but because of the way it was mounted all that was needed was to relocate the generator on the base and reposition the cover.

Sometimes you get lucky.