An electrical circuit that is a bit scary
A glance at the pile of cables above the batteries was enough to make my first opinion. Then the discovery of old lead fuses to protect the board confirmed my first impression. It is clear that nothing was right on this boat as far as the electrics were concerned
And yet, the first 18-day trip really surprised us. Everything works, or almost! We even managed to get the windlass and its wireless remote control to work. But at the same time, I really didn't want to touch anything for fear of creating a short.
No protection or battery switch!
For example, the starters of the 2 motors are directly connected to a battery (without a battery switch). Impossible therefore to isolate them. The 3 batteries of the board seem also to be all connected together, there is no park battery servitude separated from the battery of starting engine.
The whole 12 V installation also seems to be of the same type with appliances directly connected without going through fuses or circuit breaker. This is the case of the fridge which comes straight from a battery.
As far as connections are concerned, we are in the realm of dominoes. All the wires are linked together by these little dice, often rusty, sometimes melted. And obviously, when the domino was missing, the owner had recourse to live soldering, wire on wire with a simple piece of scotch tape to hide the whole thing.
Threads of all colors without any reference
Nothing is marked, even the basic wire colors are not used. All the battery wires are black, whether you are over or under. The windlass wires are even yellow/green, wires used for grounding usually For consumers, we work with white wires. No differentiated + or -.
On the 220 V network, no differential circuit breaker is present. We are in direct from the quay plug to the plugs distributed in the boat.
Unload everything to start over
To remedy this situation, there was only one solution: start from scratch. So I set to work to remove all the old electrical network on board. With a few surprises like many wires that were no longer useful, connected to a vacuum. A nice weight loss for the boat.
I didn't go there with a lot of pliers, because for each wire, I had to know its origin in order not to cut the electrical circuit of the engines. Indeed, each engine is connected to the batteries, but also many wires arrive at the dashboard for the lights and indicators.
Empire Bus and its Digital Switching to replace
Once this reset is done (RAZ in computer science!), we have to think about rebuilding a clean, protected and simplified network. That's when I turned to Empire Bus and its Digital Switching solution. In a next article, I will explain the reasons that guided my choice.
