ed’s boat tips

I’m starting to think of spring maintenance items as my cabin fever sets in. One of the things that most folks totally ignore, don’t know about, never have heard of, has to do with anodes (most folks just call them zincs). Not just any zincs, but the ones that may be hiding inside your engine’s cooling system. There’s a picture of one here that was found hiding in the seawater inlet piping on a Caterpillar diesel I was hired to check out a few years back. In that case the boat owners knew …

Susan wrote in over this past weekend with some questions about this little beauty that she’s building currently:   Basically Susan wants this to be an all electric boat, totally traditional look with better than space shuttle technology utilized. Its going to be a cold-molded design and is actually a bit heavy for its size @4660 lbs. Just under 20 ft. LOD plus the bowsprit. Just over 9″ beam. The intended use parameters are critical for a concept like this. So, all near shore, basically to …

I’ve been getting a lot of queries lately about nuisance tripping of the new ELCI devices and whether or not some of the European systems that we see on a lot of the Beneteau and Jeanneau boats are OK and comply with US Standards and so forth. Well, we talked about the ELCI thing in my January 3 rd post (scroll down the home page for that). Today, let’s compare and contrast the European units used and the common US units. Below you see one of the commonly used 30 amp Blue Sea Systems ELCI …

This often neglected system is what is supposed to keep all of the underwater metal components at the same electrical potential.

Last week’s dirty battery post raised a good comment from reader Mike. Basically he was questioning whether the blue case visible at the top of the photo was a battery charger and if so, he was commenting that it is not a good thing. Good eye Mike! You are right, at least based on ABYC Standard A-31 which is pretty clear about mounting battery chargers and other equipment directly over a battery. To quote directly from the standard: “To avoid corrosive fumes, battery chargers, inverters and …

Can a dirty battery create problems on my boat?   Dusty, dirty batteries can cause accelerated self discharge. The battery you see in the photo above is somewhat vulnerable to accelerated self-discharge if the dust and sawdust you can see on it’s top surface gets moist. In a general sense today, new batteries are far less susceptible to self-discharge, especially via their case tops. This all has a lot to do with the case materials being made of smooth, plastic materials versus gooey tar …

A colleague sent over some photos yesterday of a small fire that had occured at one of the electrical connections on a ELCI breaker device he had sold to a customer. The photo below shows the aftermath of the small fire and the melted plastic around the terminal. The terminal above got really hot! This whole thing all centers around something I’ve said here many times before: “The primary by-product of excessive electrical resistance is HEAT”. In this case enough heat to start a fortunately …