Electrical problems?

Today we spent the day up to our elbows in Jelanea’s electrical systems.

We learned a lot.

We learned how much we don’t know about boat electrical systems.

We learned how to remove, test, and replace a wire we thought was fried.(it wasn’t)

We learned that Ben can fit into the small ‘hanging’ locker beside the chart table (where we keep all our electrical stuff, and where a lot of the wiring for our boat is.

We learned what a relay is (kinda).

We learned that we would be okay getting by on just DC current, if we couldn’t get our AC panel working again. (The only things we plugged into AC were the coffee maker – but we can boil water on the stove an use a french press, and my computer, which I’m ordering a 12v charger for, and Ben’s phone, which he can charge at work)

And – we learned that we didn’t actually have the problem we thought we did and really everything was fine. Or something like that. Most things are working again – but we aren’t really sure what happened or how we fixed it, or if anything was broken to begin with….

We woke up with 3 problems, and we are ending the night with a completely different problem.

We woke up to pretty low batteries (69% charged), a solar charger with a frowny face (meaning it wasn’t charging our batteries) and an inverter that wouldn’t turn on (to make the ever important coffee.)

The batteries wouldn’t be a problem so much, if our marina was providing electricity – but as they are still building the marina, electricity is not yet available. So we are still depending on our batteries, and our solar panels ability to recharge them every day. If its not a sunny day we have been running the generator to recharge the batteries, trying to keep them in the 90% charged zone.

We both called out of work for the day, and got digging into our electrical system, that we knew nothing about.

At first we thought a wire might have fried when we tried to use the electric griddle on Sunday morning to make pancakes. The griddle turned on, drew a TON of amps, and then promptly shut off – after the pancakes had already been poured on (of course.)

The pancakes were saved by transferring them to the stove-top griddle. We then went for a 7 hour sail and had no use for the AC electrical panel during this time, and just assumed our solar panels were recharging the batteries on the beautiful sunny day. It wasn’t until Monday morning that we realized the solar panels were not charging the batteries, and probably hadn’t been all day Sunday, and it seemed something was wrong with the inverter as well.

We called a few electricians, when we felt we were in over our heads, but no one could make it out to us until Wednesday – we knew our batteries wouldn’t last that long, so we kept digging.

We removed the wire we thought might have been blown out, used YouTube to figure out how to test it, and learned it was actually just fine. So we replaced said wire (which we should have realized wasn’t the problem because it wasn’t attached to the inverter in any way shape or form.) While in the process of removing/re-installing this wire, we found a circuit breaker. It wasn’t tripped, but we reset it anyway. This didn’t seem to make any difference (but now we know there is a circuit breaker!)

Then we figured there was something wrong with the inverter unit itself, we pulled out our huge packet of instruction manuals and read up on anything electrical we could fine. The inverter, the solar charger, the battery monitor, etc. We found a on/off button on the inverter and tried the old ‘turn it off, turn it on’ trick, crossed our fingers and hoped. We were hopeful for a minute, because turning on the inverter now showed it producing 12 volts instead of 0, progress!

But when it didn’t go higher than 12 we were stumped.

So we moved onto the solar charger – if we could get the batteries to recharge from the solar we’d be in decent shape. We didn’t NEED to use AC current, we could get by running off DC if we could only recharge our batteries.

Checking on the solar charger again, and happy face! It was suddenly working again! Perhaps reseting the circuit breaker did this – we will never really know, but we were glad the solar panels were once again recharging our batteries. Two problems down (low batteries and no solar power.)

The inverter was still a problem, and calling the manufacturer resulted in a suggestion for a hard reset. Meaning disconnecting all the batteries at the battery terminals, waiting somewhere between 10 minutes and 48 hours, and then reconnecting to erase any memory the inverter had.

This sounded like a big project, way to much for how late it already was in the day – so we talked about shutting off the batteries for the night to see if that worked. Before we tried that I decided to call the previous owner to see if he had any insight into what might be wrong.

He did, and I’m shaking my head now at our naivete.

So in the engine compartment there is a light plugged into a AC outlet. This light is always on when the inverter is on, and lets you know that the inverter is working. Except the light wasn’t on, after talking to the owner I went to check and it wasn’t on. I turned on the inverter, and then tried the light, and nothing happened. Disappointed that it couldn’t be ‘that’ easy, I decided to try one more thing. I turned on the hot water heater, which pulls off the AC panel, and finally the volt meter jumped to 110 where it should be.

Our issue all along? We had the inverter on, but not the cabin outlets – so the let didn’t have power running to it at all – so it couldn’t pull the current and ‘wake-up’ the inverter.

Turns out our inverter has a ‘sleep’ mode, where it will drop down to a super low voltage if there is nothing asking it for power. The light in the engine room’s purpose was to create that constant ‘asking’ for power to display the correct voltage on the meter. But in order for it to ‘ask’ the cabin outlets also have to be on.

So was it really fine all day and it was just user error? Or was something wrong and in our digging around and futzing with things we somehow fixed it without knowing? We will never know the answer.

Unfortunately, our digging around into the electrical systems seems to have overloaded the battery monitor which suddenly stopped working. After the previous owner helped me find the fuse, I jiggled it a bit and the monitor is working again. The problem now is that the monitor assumes your batteries are at 100% when it turns on. When I jiggled the fuse and got it working again it showed our batteries at 100%. Yay! Wait – that doesn’t sound right.

So now we are in the situation of not knowing what level our batteries are at, so until we get electricity on the dock and can plug in for 24 hours and know that our batteries are full – we just have to hope we aren’t ruining them by running them too low.

And so ends a long day of digging through electrical stuff for really no reason at all, and creating a problem that didn’t need to be.

Ah – boat life.