Suddenly, a boating hassle

It’s perhaps just as well we didn’t have Sally with us today as we’ve had a typical boater’s emergency. All seemed well first thing; lazy start, potter about eating porridge and checking emails/BBC news/Canal World when the mains went off.

Sheila was running a washload and my first thought was that we’d run out of credit on the meter, but no, all was well there. By the time I’d come back to the boat it had come back on again, so I shrugged, assumed it had been a brief marina-wide power outage and rebooted the Mac Mini.

I should explain that whilst in the marina, we normally have the inverter/charger set to “charge only”. This means that if the shoreline power fails the 240V circuit in the boat dies and there’s no risk of trying to run the washing machine off the battery bank, as would be the case if we left the inverter/charger to switch automatically between the two power sources.

We continued to have interruptions to the supply all morning; a quick phone call to the office established that the marina as a whole wasn’t having a problem so that it must have been something specific to us.

Finally, the power come back for a bit, long enough to get the washload finished. By now it was lunchtime, so we scoffed our soup and sarnies. Once fed and watered I set to and checked the integrity of the shoreline from the pole to the isolation transformer and on into the connector in the well deck.

All was bright and shiny and nice and tight. I put it all back together and guess what….

Now the power wouldn't come on at all.

/no

At one stage I had heard a clattery buzzing noise coming from somewhere in the electrics cupboard and it occurred to me that the supply switching relay might have given up the ghost. We have two shoreline connectors, one at the back and one at the front and to ensure that the one not in use isn’t live, a relay switches between the two depending upon which has the mains across it.

This relay defaults to the stern connector, so if it had failed, the well deck connector would now be isolated regardless. I popped round to Midland Chandlers (oh the joy of having a well stocked chandlery on site) and bought an extra shoreline.

Using this to connect the supply to the stern connector solved the problem.

Result.

So now we have the line from the power pole coming into the well deck and connecting to the isolation transformer, then a nice new (if slightly pricey) line from there, over the roof and down to connect to the stern.

We can cope like this for the remainder of our stay this winter and get Peter at Braidbar to change the relay when we’re up there at the end of the summer. With hindsight, a manual rotary switch wouldn’t have been vulnerable to this problem, at the minor cost of having to switch it when connecting up.

Sometimes, labour saving devices can be more trouble that they are worth.

And finally…

We’ve got our Boat Safety exam in a couple of weeks; here’s a photo of Sally last Sunday. She’s checking the death date on the fire extinguishers for us:

Grandpa, do you know this one expires in 2015?