New Tech For Old Boat

Big Duck is a 1972 Land-n-Sea houseboat. I've owned her for a little over 10 years.

Here's the story on Big Duck
 

The last time out with the family, the macerator wouldn't work. I had run clean water into the black tank and wanted to pump it out. The macerator pump wouldn't come on. It can get stuck after not being used for a time, so I thought it just needed a manual nudge with a screwdriver -- but that didn't get it going. It had to be the fuse. If I ran the macerator for too long, sometimes it would blow the fuse. I'd stopped most of that problem by putting a 5 minute timer in the circuit, but even then if it had to work real hard sometimes the fuse would pop.

Sure enough, when we returned home I could see the fuse had blown. The fuse panel is in the bilge and is not easy to see or access. This panel runs circuits in the bilge that are independent of the helm, like the macerator, bilge lights and bilge spotlight, two separate bilge pump circuits (with different buzzers for each so I can tell from the helm when they come on), a relay for the electric fuel pump and hookup posts to conveniently hook up the timing light (rather than having to get to a battery).

Not only being tough to see, it's a rats-nest of wires which yes, I'll get around to sanitizing one day. Then while changing the macerator fuse I noticed my secondary bilge pump came on. That pump is only supposed to run if the bilge water overpowers the primary pump. The fuse for the primary bilge pump was good, so I assumed the primary bilge pump or switch had failed. 

I ordered and installed a new bilge pump switch. I like these because there' no moving parts.

After installing the new primary pump switch, the primary bilge pump still wouldn't come on. It wasn't the pump because I could jump it to get it running. Figuring I'd screwed up the installation or had a defective switch, I pulled the switch back out and tested it on the bench. It worked fine. I totally rewired the primary pump to be sure the wiring wasn't the culprit. The damn pump still wouldn't come on. 

Then guess what? I discovered the fuse was blown. After all that work, I'd probably blown that fuse either taking the old switch out or putting the new one in. What a waste of time!

 Deciding I was never going to go through that again I decided to modernize the fuse panel. Today's fuse panels come with little led indicators that light up when the fuse has blown.

 I got the new panel here.

So now, I can easily tell when a fuse is blown without standing on my head and squinting. 

This is a bad macerator fuse - as witnessed by the red led.

And while I was at it. I decided to install a meter for testing 12 volt stuff. Testing that new bilge pump switch and future testing was made easier by incorporating a new volt and ammeter circuit on my workbench

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