We have 60 red wires which are all  going into mysterious places behind the power distribution board, hmmm so what does what....

One of the things that made me very uncomfortable when looking at this was the thought of losing all power to our yacht and 2am in unsavoury weather and not knowing where to start. So an investigation into what every relay, switch and wire was used for, needed to be carried out for safety reason and peace of mind. In our case this is what we found out:-

• ·         The main feed from the domestics to power distribution board was not fused. 
•  Several devices were not individually fused or wired directly to the domestic battery bank. 
• A good 10% of the wiring either went nowhere or was not connected to anything. 
•  In some cases the black wires were used for both the positive and negative wiring. 
•  The power distribution was a spaghetti mess and could benefit from a tidy and from several junction boxes to contain some of the wire joins. 
•  The current alternator was of too low an output to run all the electrics and charge the batteries at the same time. 
• A list of the types of fuses, switches, wire gauges and relays could be created for spares

Once the job of wire tracing was over I could get on with the list of jobs to undertake (thankfully the contortion to trace all the wires in tiny places didn’t last too long).  This is the list of jobs we completed before we left;

• Fuses, fuses, fuses for everything and anything that was un-fused that consumed power. 
• Several wires and connections had to be replaced which were suspect. 
• Junction boxes were added to tidy up wiring in power distribution board. 
•  An 80amp alternator was installed (special attention must be paid to the wiring from alternator to the batteries as voltage drop can dramatically increase charging times). 
• A Sterling multistep regulator was fitted to modify the alternators output. This enabled the charging system to operate at bulk, absorption and float modes. I cannot over emphasise how much different this makes to reduce our charging times to our domestic battery banks. The device in only £90 pound. 
• A battery monitor was fitted so discharge and charge rates could be monitored. 
• A 300Watt Stirling inverter was installed that we could charge both our laptops. 
• All cabin lights were replaced with LED lights.

As our leaving date quickly approached we found it necessary to prioritise what was looked at and fixed. Although we managed to complete our key items there was much more I would have liked to checked and tested, yet we had no such luxury based on our time scale.  Once again the lesson learned; whatever your estimated time scale  – double it!