SOMETIMES IT'S THE LITTLE THINGS

I don't spend a lot of time on docks with BIANKA. The boat lives on a mooring in the homeport and usually on the anchor or mooring when cruising. Though sometimes I splurge for an overnight stay here and there to re water or get provisions etc... Then there was the recent cruise where I entered a harbor at 9:30 at night tired from a ten hour sail where a lot of hours where at the helm. I was not in the mood to try and deal with anchoring and did not want to disturb the other boats by firing up the generator to recharge the batteries. So I tied up to a marina dock for the night. The good thing about it I'd be able to plug in the DUAL PRO 4 charger to charge and balance BIANKA's 8A4D AGM batteries that make up the 48 volt propulsion bank. So that's what I did. As soon as I'd finished plugging in I went to bed exhausted.  A couple of hours later I woke up to answer natures call and noticed steady green lights on the charger which meant that all four batteries were fully charged.  Glad to see that. Then a few hours later when I woke up again I noticed that one of the batteries had a single red light on. This indicated that the battery was only 30% charged. This was not good but, I still tired thought I would deal with this in the morning. In the morning the light was still on indicating the battery was only partially charged. There were two possibilities as I saw it. One I had a battery that went bad during the night or that something was wrong with the cable from the Dual Pro charger to the battery. I was hoping for the latter to be the issue and it was.

I used my instrument panel at the helm to first  check the individual battery voltages and found they were all very close. So it looked like the battery was fully charged. So my attention shifted to the battery charger. I thought it might be a bad connection on the battery but, as I touched the fuse holder that the Dual Pro has in line I felt it somewhat warm. It turns out that the fuse was not seated all the way and had become loose enough that a bad connection occurred triggering the charger to interpret this as a poorly charged battery.

At first everything looked normal:

But, as I started to check the holder it just came loose:

I had not actually fiddled with this holder since I installed my instrumentation panel at the helm. Which must have been over a year ago. But, obviously I had not seated the fuse properly back then and it had finally become loose enough to make a bad contact. I reseated it and the charger reacted normally. If you compare the picture below with the first fuse picture above you cane see the difference in spacing on the left side of the fuse:

This all goes to show that sometimes what looks like a major problem might not actually be so bad. In fact it might be just a little thing like a bad contact on a fuse that is the issue.

INSTRUMENTATION PROJECT PART SIX: Choose to Fuse

So it's time to start thinking about the wiring the instrumentation project up. Since I'll be running 12 volts out to the helm from each of the 8A4D batteries in the 48 volt propulsion bank. Also since each battery is also rated at around 210 amps it is real good idea to have fuse in line with each of the meters.  On the Paktrakr meter there was a 1/4 amp fuse soldered in line with the power lead.  It was easy to blow it when hooking it up to the battery terminals. So I soldered in an  In-line AGC Fuse Holder so I could disconnect it or replace it easily.  It worked OK. but, the two pieces when disconnected easily separated and the contacts could be come exposed  if one was not careful. Since I would be using at least four fuses in the instrumentation project I wanted to use a better fuse holder. One that would not expose it's contacts or wander around in the confined space around the batteries.


I found what I needed with a In-Line Waterproof fuse holder made by Bussman. The waterproof aspect of these fuse was not that important in my application. Because if these fuses are ever under water I would have other problems to worry about. But, other qualities of these fuses are useful for this project.

For example the yellow color makes them stand out in the dark space where the batteries are located. Even more important is that when disconnecting the fuse the two pieces are connected together and don't separate.

 Also the contacts are securely crimped and not just tack soldered to the contact face like the in line fuse holder I used with the Paktrker.

This makes for a secure connection that will not easily pull apart. For the wire connecting the fuse holder to the battery I cut open some 16 AWG duplex marine wire with a box cutter and removed the red and yellow wires for the fuse connections:

The 16 gauge wire was a little hard to install into the fuse holder. So I spread a little dish washing liquid onto the wire insulation which made it much easier to push the wire through the opening:

At the other end of the wire I crimped on a closed marine lug and used some heat shrink on the crimped end:

So now that I had the In-Line Waterproof fuse holders connected to the batteries on one end. On the other end of the fuse I used a short piece of the 16 AWG wire and connected it to an Anderson 30 amp Powerpole connector. I'll explain why I chose to do this in a future Instrumentation Project post.

FOR THE INSTRUMENTATION PROJECT PART FIVE CLICK HERE

FOR THE INSTRUMENTATION PROJECT PART SEVEN CLICK HERE