Wayne wrote in last week describing what can only be described as a scary situation (I know its happened to me.)  It seems the water pump on his nearly 30 year old Universal diesel finally had a bearing failure. What happens when this occurs is that the impeller inside the pump housing begins to scrape on the inside of the pump housing and depending upon the design clearances, maybe even the front of your engine block. Wayne wrote in I think because he probably remembers that I've talked about what I describe as "black fairy dust" all over the front of your engine being caused by alternator pulley alignment due to missing shims on the alternator mount. The fairy dust is actually the fan belt(s) on your engine slowly grinding away due to the misalignment situation. It's powered rubber. Well, Wayne wanted to remind me that this observation may not always be caused by alternator misalignment. Wayne's right, it could also be water pump pulley misalignment. The bottom line here is that this sort of failure can really spoil an otherwise great cruise if it happens when you are far from home. Don't count on finding a new water pump quickly or easily, and no it will not be inexpensive!

So, what pulley am I talking about here? Check out the photo below. The red arrow is pointing to the pulley to check:

You really should grab this pulley and see if it rocks from side to side at all, checking for any radial run-out in the bearing. You may also want to remove the belt temporarily and give the pulley a few spins so you can feel for any roughness in the bearing(s). Better to find these things out while you are making ready than underway. If you do feel roughness, or there is a lot of radial run-out of the pulley, you should order up a new water pump asap. That way you'll be ready when it does fail. If you are already seeing the fairy dust, get some new belts too because they are effectively worn out if they have already begun spewing rubber dust all over the front of your engine. Oh, and don't try to cheap out here; trust me, it is not cost effective to try and rebuild these pumps

It's spring, its in the low 50's here in RI and that means its time to start getting the boat ready for the summer. The whole getting the boat ready thing has very different meaning to a lot of people. To one friend of mine Spring get ready means getting into every nook and cranny on the boat with a tooth brush to clean. To others it means pulling the cover off, slopping some anti-fouling bottom paint on and getting it launched. For me, it means a careful inspection of all systems to make sure everything is absolutely up to snuff and in top mechanical and electrical condition as well as a good cleaning, but without the tooth brush....

For people with older boats you need to spend some time looking for things that have worn or that perhaps were not done properly in the first place. But, the question becomes how do you know? That's where I come in. My plan here is to offer up a series of things to look at or look for over the next few weeks to help you get a handle on the good and the bad and to offer up some advice on how to make things right. So this week let's get a look at a photo a reader sent in of a battery charger install....and its not a very good one either.

So today's exercise is for you to get to your boat and access as much of your electrical gear as possible for a good visual inspection. In the photo above, we're looking at a battery charger installed on aboat. The green arrows are pointing out two, no actually three major flaws in the installation. The top arrow is point to two wires pulled through the metal case on the charger. One is a grounding wire that does not appear to have ever been connected to anything. If a short circuit were to develop inside the battery charger case, it would go unnoticed until someone got zapped! Remember that the green wire in the boat's AC electrical system is there to protect people against shock hazards. That only works if the green wires are actually attached to the boat's grounding system. Missed that little nuance on this install.

The white wire is the AC neutral conductor for the shore-power supply to the charger. Its rubbing pretty hard against the nice sharp edge of the metal battery charger case, it'll chafe through the insulation sooner or later, causing that short circuit I just mentioned. Touch the battery charger case when that happens and you;ll know exactly what I'm talking about here.....There should be a chafe bushing around the perimeter of that hole in the side of the charger case.

The bottom arrow is pointing to a pair of my favorite things, wire nuts. The kind used for residential and commercial land-based wiring that uses single strand solid copper wire, not multistrand boat cable. These are guaranteed to have damaged the stranding on the cables used and will eventually just fall off. You need to be looking for things like this on your boat as you get it ready this spring. If you are unsure or afraid to mess with electricity, get a trained individual to do it for you. Its just plain worth paying someone to correct things like this if you don't have the skills to do it yourself. Make sure you use an ABYC certified technician for this kind of work.

I'm starting to think of spring maintenance items as my cabin fever sets in. One of the things that most folks totally ignore, don't know about, never have heard of, has to do with anodes (most folks just call them zincs). Not just any zincs, but the ones that may be hiding inside your engine's cooling system. There's a picture of one here that was found hiding in the seawater inlet piping on a Caterpillar diesel I was hired to check out a few years back. In that case the boat owners knew all about their engines zincs and hired me to figure out why the one you see in the photo (skinny grey colored thing in the middle) was consuming itself in 2-3 weeks.......

The bottom line on finding these things? Owners manual? Check with your engine maker and see what online resource they have.... I can tell you their location is NOT always obvious. As for how long they should last, typically through a normal 6-9 month boating season. In the case above, we had a water flow velocity issue and the anodes were being impacted by what is called "erosion corrosion". The water in the raw water intake plumbing was screaming by this anode so quickly it was literally scrubbing it away in a couple of weeks. The fix in this case was a matter of relocating the anode to a place in the system where the velocity of the water flow was significantly slower. All ended well.

So, find your engine anodes and check them out. If you've never seen them, they may actually be gone so you may have to start from scratch with this.

This is Gerry testing browser #3

First, Happy New Year to all! I had a reader query just before the holidays having to do with using a portable generator on a boat equipped with an ELCI device installed at the shore power inlet. For those not familiar with the ELCI device, check out my article in the EBT archives: http://www.edsboattips.com/maintenance-a-diy/21-introducing-the-elci

As for the type of generator we're talking about here, it would look something like this one:

So, the query reads like this: "Please discuss how the use of a portable generator not built into the boat's charging system but rather plugged into the AC inlet is not functional with an electrical panel having an ELCI due to the use of an isolated ground on the portable generator not having a neutral-ground bond as would be found on a marine genset at the power source on the boat."

 Basically, there are a few things that we have learned about ELCI's in the last several years and more to the point, what things can make them trip mysteriously. In this case its kind of difficult to be absolutely positive because we don't have a complete wiring diagram for the entire installation available, but based on some history, we can be reasonably certain the ELCI in the above case is reacting to what it sees as an "open ground" situation. This means a break in the grounding circuit between the generator and the ELCI at the shorepower inlet.

To reiterate a point I've made here in the past, the generators like the one shown above simply have no place on boats. They were never intended for use on boats, even though you and I have all seen vendors at boat shows hawking these generators, they are a cause for concern when people use them on their boats. In this case the tripping ELCI is a good example. Other examples have been mysteriously glowing reverse polarity lights on the AC panels when the generator is running and the constant worry over carbon monoxide poisioning from the gasoline engine these things are running with.

Blue Sea ELCI Box. Great for system retro-fit on older boats without an ELCI integrated into the main AC panel board

Without getting into the esoteria of why at this point, a brief rundown of the things we know today that can cause nuisance tripping with ELCI devices is:

• "False" grounds on board, i.e. neutral wire and grounding wires connected at appliances or panel bus bars.
• Swapped neutral scenarios in dual load groups.
• Vessels equipped with auto-trip devices for reverse polarity.
• Electronic "noise" issues from loads on the boat or dock.
• VHF emissions in close proximity to the ELCI CT coils.
• Green grounding conductor routed through the ELCI sensing (CT) coil.
• Open in grounding circuit.
• Depending in the specific ELCI, very sensitive to back feeding. They cannot be used as part of a source selector and may also be polarity sensitive.

So to answer our reader query, I'm thinking the device is sensing an open ground in this case. But, without a bit more info, I can't be sure about back-feeding or reversed polarity issues either.

Hope this helps.