Electrical, it looks simple. The black wire goes to the negative side and the red wire goes to the positive side, right? How hard can it really be? I have helped the electricians wire a few houses during my time as a general contractor. I have also rewired the lights on a couple of flat bed trailers. So I felt fairly confident upgrading the electrical systems on our sailboat. So with excited anticipation I dove right in. All that I wanted to do was upgrade from two batteries to four, add a windless, pressurized fresh water, and an inverter. It took less then 10 minutes for the excitement to wear off and the realization that I might be in over my head. It soon became very clear to me that I needed to gain a lot more knowledge than I currently possessed.
What does one do when they need to gain knowledge? The internet, yes the internet, that is where all the collective knowledge of the universe is stored. I watched YouTube videos, I searched out information on cruiser forums. I googled, found, and read many articles on marine electrical. I spent weeks gathering information, studying, educating myself. The more I learned the more it became clear to me that I did not know, what I did not know. The more information I gathered the more I realized that I would be redoing a lot more then I had initially intended. I looked at our sailboat, our future home, and the thought of it catching on fire because of faulty wiring scared the hell out of me.
Wire nuts are not allowed, I could see a few being used in our current wiring. All the connections should be heat shrink terminals, a lot of ours were not. There should be fuses or breakers on the main wiring so that if there is a dead short you do not catch your boat on fire, we had none. While walking around my mind slipped back 25 years ago or so when I was a senior in high school. I had spent a couple years restoring a 1952 chevrolet pickup, I installed a new motor and transmission, rewired all the electrical, lights, starter, stereo, etc. I was leaving the parking lot one day for lunch, my then girlfriend and now wife Jesica was sitting on the bench seat right next to me, hand on my thigh, radio blasting rock music, just cruising along out of the parking lot. Suddenly my truck was engulfed in this thick toxic, foul smelling smoke. We opened the driver side door and fell out coughing and gasping for air, confused and trying to figure out what had just happened. It was a dead short! A small wire to the stereo had chafed on the metal dashboard of the truck and immediately shorted out, melting about five feet worth before finally breaking off, filling the cab with smoke. If that small wire can cause that much smoke I can not imagine the damage that a one gauge wire connected to four deep cycle batteries would do. I nervously looked around some more wondering what else I might find.
It did not take long to find how poorly the bilge pump was installed, it had been spliced together, twice in two feet! They used non waterproof butt connectors on one splice and just twisted the wires together and taped them together on the other splice. Both splices were just lying on the bottom of the bilge! I’m not a safety nut, but the bilge pump is probably a pretty important thing to have wired properly. So, yeah, I have pretty much replaced every thing.
The musings of a middle aged man ~ Sam