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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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