I Hate Electrical
So renovations have begun. First things first, we are going to need lights to work under the winter cover. Unfortunately all the cables in the battery box were un-labeled. We traced the wires back and attached the terminals. Nothing happened. So we did it again with different wires. This time there was a bit of smoke and again nothing. The third time we got power to the meter on bank #1 but no lights. I opened up the panel and discovered the battery selector was cracked. I went home tired and defeated.
Day two dawned cold and damp. Debbie stayed home and I loaded the car with tools and made my way back to the marina. I carefully went through the spider web of wires and removed half a dozen circuits that led nowhere. Over the years successive owners had installed and removed a number of instruments and accessories and had left the live circuits tangled in the mass of wire. Bit by bit I sorted through it all. In the end I had 15 feet of old wire and about 50 feet of coax cable on the floor. The electrical panel and busses looked neat and tidy. I will change the battery selector to a "Guest" selector this week and install new battery cables and all should be well. Maybe electrical work is not as big a deal as I imagined. Time will tell.
Day two dawned cold and damp. Debbie stayed home and I loaded the car with tools and made my way back to the marina. I carefully went through the spider web of wires and removed half a dozen circuits that led nowhere. Over the years successive owners had installed and removed a number of instruments and accessories and had left the live circuits tangled in the mass of wire. Bit by bit I sorted through it all. In the end I had 15 feet of old wire and about 50 feet of coax cable on the floor. The electrical panel and busses looked neat and tidy. I will change the battery selector to a "Guest" selector this week and install new battery cables and all should be well. Maybe electrical work is not as big a deal as I imagined. Time will tell.
Update on Electrical
Projects like this never quite go as planned. Boats have a nasty way of redirecting our energies as new and more serious issues are discovered forcing our attention. The restoration of Windover was no exception. What I thought would be a few winter evenings of wiring turned into a major refit of all things electrical. Everything coming from the panel seemed in good repair but everything leading to the panel was toast. We basically had to rewire from the engine to the distribution panel, from the batteries to the panel and from the 110V system to the charger and on to the batteries. In total I used almost 100 feet of #8 wire and 50' of 1/0 cable to accomplish this. The results after four long sessions with our good friend Chris Hardy....master fixer upper...we had a fantastic system with monitoring, isolation for a starting system and two huge house banks. The results look like this and are located under the aft port and starboard quarter berths.