mattonthesea
Well-known member
Apart from my thanks to N-way too; they delivered to us in St Mary's when we couldn't wait for it at home. Fab service.
After a year of use I sent the below feedback to Torqueedo. I have not received a response
"Hi
We bought a Torqeedo 1103 in summer of 2020. WE used it for two weeks in the Isles of Scilly that summer and then over 14 weeks during 2021 while we sailed from Bristol to Harwich around the south of England. We thought that you may like some customer feedback, our review.
Overall, we are very happy with it. It is easy to use, quiet and non-threatening. This last point is in regard to my partner; she found our two-stroke outboard engine difficult to start and frightening once it did start. The Torqeedo she finds much easier to navigate around beaches and rocks and anchorages. That is a significant issue as it means that I am not always the one steering. I can leave her to use the dinghy on her own.
It is so much easier to transfer from the pushpit to the dinghy. Being able to hand the battery down after means that the individual parts are that much lighter than a normal petrol outboard.
I would recommend liveaboard users to have a second battery so that one can be solar charging while you use the other during the day. Ours charges at about 1.5% per hour if the sun is shining and a run ashore takes on average about 7% so we needed to find a shore power source fairly often.
We had only had the unit for a few days when then battery fell off a bunk. The drop was only about 20cm but one of the fins on the handle snapped off. We repaired it easily but it seems to be made of a very brittle plastic. This was even more obvious this year when I knocked the tiller off a cockpit seat, again a drop of 20cm. This time one of the edges that fits into the main body snapped; a much more worrying break as it is important for the steering. We fixed it with epoxy resin but again it seemed too easy to break for such an expensive and well-designed item.
The other problem we had is that the battery connector to the main body is a cheap, plastic screw-threaded connector. When sitting in a stable area this is not too difficult to use but when sitting on the edge of a dinghy in a choppy sea while tied to a yacht it is far too easy to cross thread the connection. Even after all the weeks of using it we have to check very carefully every time we use it. It is probably the single most annoying aspect of the unit.
A minor issue it that the grommet on the tiller cable, where it goes through the handle, has never stayed in the hole despite the several times we have put it back. It looks like it might have been inserted upside down.
We suggest two improvements for the unit – both to do with security: one is to make the kill line magnet into a key. If it can’t be started without the correct kill line magnet then it is less likely to be stolen. The second is to include a ‘find me’ function in the GPS. With some relatively easy to include software that would mean that, if stolen, I would be easier to track if it was stolen. That is not to say that anti-theft precautions should not be taken; just that if they failed then there would be further backup.
I hope that you find this useful. Please can you reply just to acknowledge that it has got to the right department and not got lost in the ether!
Yours