Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Blown Alternator and Class T 300Amp Fuse

Well when stuff goes wrong on a boat it never seems to be an easy fix.  In an attempt to find out what happened during last week's trip down river when we lost electrical power, I began trouble shooting our 12V system.

Upon testing the alternator I discovered the diodes were blown in it.   Luckily I had a back up alternator on boat.
Blown Alternator
As you can see in the photo a good deal of black soot was coming from the back around the area of the button diodes.

Shiny new alternator
Both alternators had the same rating, but the new one had terminals slightly higher then the older one, requiring a new ground cable to the engine block.  Once that was done all work well with the engine.
Fitting new ground cables
But not everything worked the way it should.  The house batteries would only work when the starter battery switch was in the combined mode.  So I dug all around in the engine room looking for the issue.    Then I thought about the two little girls from AdventureSail a couple of weeks ago.   Their motto was it's never the wrong time for a selfie.   I figured why not, no one would really believe I was upside down the in the engine room any way.



A bit more digging around led to the discovery that current on the house batteries were reversing themselves through the combiner. A Class T 300 Amp fuse near the positive side of the house batteries had blown.  Replacing that led to the problems all begin resolved.



No comments:

Post a Comment