What's this?? 12v cable run under berth

[boatruptcy]

Does anyone have an idea what this wire run is for, mounted on bulkhead under v berth. Looks like 4awg cable that is robbing power from thruster motor, has a very weird and not very safe set of resettable breakers being fed by 12awg wire. I can trace it to the microwave cabinet but haven't looked any further.

[DougSea]

Definitively added post delivery from Albin. That would never have come out of the factory!

If I was to venture a guess I'd say there is or was a small inverter for the microwave or...I have no idea.

That breaker setup is crap (as I'm sure you know). I'm guessing that they either couldn't get a big enough breaker or they just got lazy. But hey, at least they had some kind of circuit protection!

What's with the black fan viable in the top photo? Looks like it ventilates the compartment but I can't quite tell. Do you have air conditioning?

[boatruptcy]

Yeah, I have A/C, that's an older fan, I'm going to pull it out. I went to the boat this morning and it looks like it is factory wired, the original zip ties that are secured with even spacing carry the run up under the sink cabinet. I will pull the fridge and see where it ends, but yes, that is a terrible way to connect a breaker. If you are pulling enough load to justify 4awg cable, then why would you try circuit protection with 12awg, makes no sense and the 12 ga will burn up before the breakers trip if I had to guess. I'm going to disconnect it tonight for peace of mind until I trace it down. I thought it could be inverter as well but why not pull from engine room and mount on bulkhead.

[DougSea]

Well, even if the bulk of the wiring is factory, there is NO way that breaker setup is. It's also possible the wiring was added by the dealer who delivered the boat. My guess would be that the large terminal block would be for a large fuse like this:

https://www.bluesea.com/products/5005/A ... 35_to_300A

And that the owner (or some idiot repair guy) replaced it with that mess of a breaker setup when they couldn't find a replacement.

I'll be interested to hear what you find!

[boatruptcy]

Well I found it home run back to the bulkhead in the engine room, went all the way through the cabinet under the mid berth and tied into fuse from battery, however the main run of power to thruster goes under the salon floor in bilge, so that's great, the thruster can trip either breaker, ha! It's a circular circuit. I'm disconnecting it from the battery and the thruster and leaving the run in place. What a joke.

[boatruptcy]

So, upon further research, that bus bar appears to be the original fuse holder and I bet that was the original factory wiring run, someone probably was burning through too many fuses when the thruster needed service and rather than paying $30 bucks or so for a fuse they put in that mickey mouse resettable garbage. .....Then later someone else came through and ran direct to the thruster under the floor with their own power supply. See pic of the fuse and look at my first image, looks like the same fuse holder.

[DougSea]

None of that makes any sense!

Thinking about it I'm wondering if the 4AWG was pre-wiring for a windlass. Albin ran pretty beefy wire to their thrusters and 4awg is undersized for that.

So that's my new guess!

[boatruptcy]

Hmmm , not sure what gauge should be run to power the thruster, guess i can look it up, right now that second run isn't really doing anything to help with voltage loss because it is tied together with those wimpy 12gauge wires to the circuit breaker. I think the main supply is only 2 or 4 awg as well, I'll have to check. Also that fuse holder is wayyyy too far away from the batteries, it should be mounted in the engine room, the whole thing is funky.

[boatruptcy]

I ended up running new power and ground cables since the original install was under-sized. Moved the fuse block back to the engine room and mounted an older overhead light I had left over (wired both bulbs together and put in led bulbs), works pretty well. While I was at it, I re-wired the entire thruster and cleaned all the terminals with a wire brush, this boat is hard to maneuver and don't want any chance of the thruster going down.