The marine store I work at has had a few ask about the Efoy. It is an interesting product. But it is hardly going to generate enough power for electric propulsion. 210 AH in 24 hours @ 12 volts won't do must for a 36 or 48 volt bank. And it does cost almost $6,000. May make sense for a cruiser as an option to solar or wind gen for house bank charging though.
I have now quoted a couple of these and after doing the research found it to be a very expensive way of generating power...
The biggest problem, other than expense, is that even the EFOY 2200 only pumps out 7.5A of charge current or roughly 90W Wind and solar can easily exceed this, and for a lot less than half the installed price.
The fuel cells also need to be purchased directly from EFOY, and are pretty pricey... Over the long haul at the cost of the unit, the fuel cells and how much current we use on boats it's a tough sell until they can get these up to 20-30A output +........
The fuel cost for these units is quite steep. Roughly $20.00 per gallon plus shipping. It runs about $5.00 per kilowatt-hour or roughly $5.00 for every 80 amp-hours of charging. A single 140W solar panel will produce 40 +/- Ah's /day for no additional cost. Oh and when I say plus shipping, I mean PLUS.
My closest EFOY dealer is in MA and when I priced it out last time for a customer who wanted the straight dope on them I found that shipping an M-10 fuel-cell, which is 2.6 GAL, it cost nearly $100.00 to get from MA to ME due to the fact that it had to go FedEX and was classified as Haz Mat shipping. So 2.6 GAL / $159.00 = $61.15 PER GALLON... That jumps the cost to well over $15.00 for every 80Ah of charging.
Also one must keep in mind that these units need a full overhaul at a cost of about $3000.00 every 4-5k hours of use. Seeing as it is a low output device one would expect to be able to run it 24/7. 24/7 use is just 166 days of 24 hour use before you hit 4k hours. Efoy also says you MUST use their highly purified fuel.... They also don't recommend a "re-build" and suggest just buying a new one every 4k - 5k hours...
*So 5k hours / 6k purchase is $1.20 per hour of use. (if 4k hours we are at $1.50 per hour)
*Now we add the fuel at about $1.50 per hour of use (with shipping).
*We are now at $2.70 for every hour of charging
*We are now at approx $64.80 per day to charge your batteries.
I can run my diesel for approx 35 minutes, replace 80Ah, and burn less than $1.50 in doing so.... To replace 80Ah with the Efoy will cost you approx $15.00 just in fuel and we've not added in the unit cost or hours costing.......
While the technology looks promising solar & wind are still a much better value until these things start pumping out 25-30A and can run on non-proprietary fuel that costs $100.00 to ship two states......
I just did a quick search on current pricing:
Efoy 2200 $9590.00
My numbers
may be off a bit and could be
low, from the last time I quoted one....