Many of these boats are 20+ years old now and the Taiwanese did not use good
wire to begin with, at least not by toady's standards. It is recommended
when working on your DC wiring, pull out as much of it as possible and
upgrade to toady's standard... tinned copper fine stranded wire, also
consult a good marine text and become familiar with how to crimp terminals
and use heat shrink on all connections. Pull out and replace all the
jumper-ed common bus bars and install the new tinned common bus bar to
reduce voltage loss in the old jumpers.

The AC wiring is worse yet, with brittle stiff stranded copper, this should
all be replaced with new wire, then test with plug adapter unit to insure
you have good connections and no neutral shorts to ground which I found on
my boat with the use of one of these little tester plugs. In stall GFI plugs
on the first plug of each AC line to bring your boat up today's safety
standards.

Dave
Baja Naval
Ensenada, BC, Mexico

On 10/31/06, Richard B. Emerson <pavilion@pinefields.com> wrote:
>
> It's been suggested that "too much knowledge is not a good thing". So I
> installed the Link 2000 and expected to see all is tickety-boo in
> battery land. BZZT! Wrong-o, acid breath! It seems that the #2 bank
> is being hammered for demand somewhat more than #1 bank. Peering into
> the maze of battery cables, bus bars, shunts, etc. I decided to "take an
> hour or two to clean up the wiring" and found the battery switch was
> cracked and falling apart. Yet another fine Guest part that will now be
> a guest in the local landfill...
>
> In removing the wiring, I found a total of four wires that wander off
> into the boat for various reasons. All are tied to +12V and none of
> them were fused. Two were quickly identified as the battery voltmeter
> sense leads for the breaker panel's voltmeter. One looks suspiciously
> like it might be used to power an auxiliary breaker panel installed by a
> "rock star" marine services specialist [/sarcasm] and one may go to the
> original breaker panel, as it's bundled with the two voltage sense
> leads. Or maybe not. At this point I simply have no clear information
> on the wire. At any rate, none of these wires are fused and all make
> solid, high current connections to the batteries (read "potential [pun
> not intended] fire hazard"). I added 2A in-line fuses for the battery
> voltage leads (the fuse probably will add some resistance, throwing off
> the reading, but, at this point, the Link 2000 is the more accurate
> voltmeter anyway). Once I can identify the real purpose of the two
> mystery wires (at 10 and 12 AWG respectively, they darn well better not
> be the main feeds for panels wired to supply 80A and 40A respectively!),
> I'll fuse them, too. For now, I've built a hot bus bar made with a
> terminal strip and straps to tie one side to 12V (from the output
> terminal on the battery switch) through a stranded 8 AWG wire just long
> enough to reach the selector switch terminals (at least only three
> "light" wires come off the switch now instead of four). The power lead
> for the Link 2000 (previously tied directly to a battery - although
> fused) plus the two mystery leads are now on the terminal strip, where
> they can be easily removed as part of figuring out their purpose in life.
>
> The point of all of the above is to encourage people to take a look at
> their battery wiring, looking for a "bed of snakes" and unfused hot
> leads. Either or both could lead to some "interesting moments" in
> dealing with electrical fires.
>
> Cheers,
> Rick Emerson
>
>
>
>
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Received on Fri Nov 3 21:01:03 2006