Floscan

I don't usually indulge in expensive electronics, but a fuel monitor is the exception. I've learned that they can quickly pay for themselves in fuel savings by allowing one to know the most economical cruising speed. I'm not fond of doing the math for the gallons per hour readouts, so I like a unit that gives me miles per gallon. The 9000 series Floscan will show a mpg readout if hooked up to a GPS that provides NMEA 0183 data. I have a Garmin 478 chart plotter that will send NMEA 0183 but the Garmin is also hooked up to the GSD 21 to provide depth readings. To display depth, the 478 must be configured to accept the sounder signal and that prohibits the use of the 478's NMEA 0183 capability. For that reason I have a Cuda 350 GPS/Sounder to provide the NMEA data to the Floscan. I like having two sounders anyway, I set one to sound a warning alarm at around 15' and the other to sound the danger alarm at about 4'.

The fuel sensor installation for the Floscan is 2 hoses and 3 wires. There are detailed instructions on placement of the sensor and routing of the hoses, but I just put it in whare it was convenient. We'll see how it goes.

The display head is another story. There are a gazillion wires coming out of the harness, a set of which are for dual engine installation which I didn't need. I had removed the old tach because the 9000 includes a digital tach readout as well as a hobbs meter so many of the connections for the 9000 were right there because they fed the old tach. By now there were so many holes in the dash from removing stuff that wasn't needed/working, that I decided I needed to make a new one.

There's a windup knob on the upper right of the steering hub. It's a 5 minute timer for the bilge blower - I can never remember to turn that darn thing off. Farther to the right is an LED that's on when the blower is running. The ignition goes in the lower right hole. Things would have been a little more organized but I didn't want to put any new holes in the old dash


The NMEA feed was a challenge. My Cuda didn't come with the NMEA cable so I had to purchase it separately. When I looked for the instructions on how to wire the cable to the Floscan, I couldn't find them. The Cuda is made by Lowrance and the accessories come from LEI Extras. Navigating the Lowrance site was awkward with many links invalid. Eventually I gave up there and went to the LEI site. No luck there either. I'd experienced this kind of frustration on previous occasions with Lowrance, but when I bought the Cuda I had forgotten it was by Lowrance. So I went back to the package the cable came in to see if I had missed any fine print, and I had. "See your unit installation manual for wiring instructions."

Back on the internet I found the .pdf manual for the Cuda installation. I couldn't just get the wire colors because the cable is doctored up for installation to "the popular Uniden brand" which takes some special circuitry that has to be removed for true NMEA operation. I needed to print 5 pages, so I entered that span of pages in the dialogue box and hit print. It printed 8 pages, only one of which was correct. I thought I had entered the span wrong so I tried again. Same results.

So I went in again and selected 'print current page' for each of the pages as I viewed them. As they were printing I noticed the .pdf  dialogue box showed a different page number than was at the bottom of the page on the screen. Lowrance had struck again.

Despite all the Lowrance runaround I did finish up the installation. It's nice when things come together. We'll give her a water test in a couple weeks.