Tag: electrics
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Battery investigations
Iโve been suspicious for a while about how hard my batteries for house are losing voltage over a ~ 12 hour day. I know the fridge compressor comes on periodically at 3 amps to keep the coolant moving around, but that doesnโt add up to taking a battery from fully charged to near fully discharged…
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Finding the right cable size for the water pump
Given the voltage drop at the pump, yesterday evening’s project was to wire the pump with 8 AWG (10mm sq) for the positive feed, and a bit of 2 AWG (35mm sq) for the negative feed. Unsurprisingly, the pump worked very happily, and the clamp ammeter gave me glimpse of ~10 – 11 amps of…
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Voltage drop at the water pump
In the middle of all the re-wiring work Dad and I did over the weekend, I noticed that the water pump didn’t sound like it normally does. It was only once or twice before it returned to sounding like normal, but it was enough of an anomaly for me to start poking at it. With…
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Wiring locker re-do/tidy
Blue Opal’s wiring locker behind the chart table is a combination of neat and messy. All of the from-the-yard wiring is clipped together nicely with small cable ties, the bundles to the switch panels are wrapped in mesh, and it’s all done very nicely into chocolate block terminals. As happens with boats, however, other wiring…
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Rewiring the batteries
Blue Opal’s battery layout, like everything on a boat, made compromises. In the port side of the saloon, there’s a small locker under the aft central cushion, and a long locker under the aft port cushion. The two house batteries occupied the entire small locker, running transverse across the hull, and the port locker had…
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Working helm windlass control
With K’s help down in the hole yesterday, we got the 3-core cable run from the console to the solenoid box for the windlass. The first problem we encountered was the one Dad and I encountered – push the wire down the pedestal steel tubing, and it stops right at the bottom. The idea was…
