Going down!
Saturday was a weird day. Our tow main projects were getting the lower food storage organized with the new lazy Susans and wiring up the Xantrex charger\inverter. Debbie was going to tackle the first one and me the second.
Most of the wiring has been previously done by us so this was simply wiring the charger\Inverter (CI) to the electrical panel. And the 30 amp shore powersocket.
Both ends of the wire (three each) needed solderless terminal ends. Come to find out I returned the box that were the correct size. We needed # 8 ends and all we had were #10 screw size ends. Because we do not want to squander our time we used the #10’s and will replace them after we get it working.
We have only one day that has more than a couple few ours of time in a single instance. That is Saturday. Sunday we do not work on the boat. After work we do not have a long block of time so Saturday is usually not for running around to the chandlery. We usually do this during the week after work, picking up the needed supplies for the projects. If we run out or whatever we move on to a different project as we have plenty of them. Although they are thinning out a bit.
Debbie in the lazzerett, she took over the lazzerett duty which there ended up being plenty of.
Debbie removing the old 110 volt wiring from the 30 amp shore power connector.
This 30 amp connector could use replacing
So now that the six
ends are set Debbie climbed into the lazzerettI did a few trips but Debbie took over, thank you Debbie) and removed the original wires
from the boat to the 30 amp socket and replaced them with our new 10\3 wires.
I then removed the
old 110 volt wires from the panel and connected the new ones. We had previously
connect up the CI to the new out 110 volt wire. We also had figured out the
panel wiring.
The neutral wire (white)
went to the top breaker which also goes to a buss. The power wire (black) went
to the next 110 volt breaker down on the panel. Now a-days the breakers are
double pole but these are single pole breakers. The green ground wire went to
the ground buss.
OK we fired up shore
power and no sparks or hot wires.
No reverse polarity and it worked. We had wired this correctly!
Note:
This box idea did not work our so we re-installed the double pole breaker at the nav station.
After waiting a bit we flipped the 30 amp
breaker we had installed just before the Xantrex CI as their instructions read.
No problem and the charger light went on.
All is great. We wait
a while for any smoke or flames and nothing.
You can see the green light is on all is well!
Now we turn on the charge (had to
re-read the instructions a bit) and the charge did not go on.
Old picture but it shows the emergency battery cut off switch at the CI
Hmmm oh wait we
forgot to flip the emergency cut off switch to ON. We do that and wala the
charger starts charging. We think the solar controller freaked out with its
readings but are not sure. We turned off the charge realizing it was set to
Gell batteries. Debbie dug through the manual and set the charger to Wet Cells
as that what we currently have for house batteries. We try the charge and it fires up. Good deal. Now we try the 110 sockets in the boat and no 110 volt
power! Oh no it’s a nuclear attack on our boat!
We spent the next
five hours figuring out what went wrong. I had thought I had wired it wrong so
I rethought the wiring and tried different scenarios. A few sparks flew and the
breaker fliped a few times. That was not it. We tried lots of stuff and none of it
easy as these wires to the panel are not easy to screw in out take out.
We now know ALL about the 110 volt wiring on the back of the electrical panel!
Debbie contorted her
self into the nav station are by sliding is the louvered door and worked up-side
down. On and on it went. We reverted back to the original setup that the boat
shipped with and still nothing. Finally we took some wire we had from another
project we are going to do and put solderless terminal ends on all six wires used
it 10\3. We then removed the original wires from the panel and cut the ones
that were doubled up into a solderless terminal end from the natural buss. We essentially
took the buss out of the equation and the breakers. We had 110 volt power to
the boat! We carefully put it all back together as it
was and used the original shore power and we had 110 power! Taking a chance as
we were now tired and running out of day light time we decide to try the CI
again. If this failed we still had just enough time and energy to get it back
to working for the night. No0 power no heat, no football, no anything 110 volt.
We did have one thing in our favor. One 110 volt plug at the nav station
worked. That plug was wired to the same exact place as the other outlets on the
series for port and starboard. So go figure, which we tried but we never
figured it out. So the charge went on
and so did the 110 throughout the boat. At this point we decide not to try any
tests in case we lost power.
Test the Charger on
the batteries overnight.
Test the inverter.
We never found out what
caused this or how we fixed it. We did find some bare 110 wires that were really
not bear but became that way when we removed the wire ties and separated the
wires. The we taped and will replace. It could have the buss was messed up but
how? We connected the wired back to the buss in different spots and there was
not any problem. Plus it had worked before we started.
Any way Saturday was
a strange day and these two projects were about all we got completed.
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