Continuing with the reporting of common findings during the ABYC safety inspection session in Annapolis last month, we touch on what is a recurring theme, wire nuts. The photo below points out the wiring behind the scenes on a boat where these little electrical devils where used.

The yellow arrows are pointing to the wire nuts.

One of the problems with wire nuts is that in spite of all the talk over the years about how bad they are, equipment vendors to this very day still provide them with installation kits for equipment intended to be used on boats. For those of you that may be new to this whole issue understand that these devices are intended and engineered for use only with single strand copper conductors such as the wire used at your house. For marine applications, multi-strand copper wiring is all that is acceptable. The problem with the wire nuts is that as they get threaded onto a two (or more) wire splice, the threads inside the wire nut cut into the fine copper stranding and actually can begin to break the individual strands. The bottom line? Some loss of theoretical conductivity of the piece of wire in question. This in turn can create electrical resistance, and as I've said here many times before, the primary byproduct of excessive electrical resistance is heat. Enough heat and you have fire. You get the rest.............

Continuing with our theme the week before last I want to look further at the results from our ABYC Boat Safety Check event last month in Annapolis. As mentioned in my last post on this event the number one item our inspectors found was faulty or non-existent ground fault circuit interrupters (GFCI's). Next on the list were issues related to over-current protection for both shore power and DC circuits on board. When I'm talking about over-current protection I'm referring to things like fuses and circuit breakers. To refresh everyone's memory, these are the devices that can prevent an electrical fire on your boat in the event of a short circuit in your electrical system, for any reason. Additionally, protection of termination points in the wiring for circuits that may not actually have a fuse or breaker installed such as starter motor circuits or in some cases alternator circuits is also a requirement under ABYC Standard E-11. The photo below, on a brand new boat illustrates that many folks, including the people actually building boats ignore this basic requirement.

Terminals such as shown on the alternator and all the termination points in any starter motor circuit need to have an insulating cap over them to keep sparks from flying if a metal object comes in contact.

The other all too common point where our inspectors found no protective cover was at positive battery terminals. Just remember that a short circuit at that point in your electrical system could cause the battery to explode. I don't think I need to explain why that might not be a good thing.

It seems I can't say it enough. Boat wiring needs to be properly protected against insulation chafing. The wiring you see in the photo below is yet another example of totally ignoring this little detail.

On the boat above the potential problem with no chafe protection is potentially lethal too. The white cables you see are actually AC power cables that are powered by shore power or when offshore the on board AC generator. Once the insulation on any of those cables gets chafed through, this boat will really come alive. The perimeter of the cut out in the aluminum you see is a sharp metal edge. A short circuit to the metal surrounding the cable run will charge up the entire hull and superstructure on the boat whenever the circuits in question are activated.

Its important for everyone to remember that these short circuits may or may not necessarily trip a circuit breaker. You need to remember that circuits breakers first of all don't trip at their nominal rating of say 10 or 15 amps. The actual trip rate is going to be somewhere around 125-150% of the nominal value. The second important point to remember is that just because the insulation gets chafed through to bare copper doesn't mean that the connection to the metal hull in this case is a good one, so the inherent electrical resistance in that connection will reduce the amount of amperage that is flowing to below even the nominal rating of the circuit breaker for the circuit in question. The bottom line? This fault will go unnoticed until somebody gets zapped! Look for these type of flaws on your boat and get them fixed asap.

One of over 20 boats that participated in our annual boating safety check program

Several weeks ago, (May 4th to be exact) ABYC held it's annual boating safety check at Port Annapolis Marina. The idea here is to offer a free safety inspection to any and all that choose to participate. ABYC and some of its member surveyors and technical specialists as well as the local Coast Guard Auxiliary work through a series of checklists and create a report for the boat owner's that give them suggestions for improvement to bring things up to compliance. This year we had 21 boats participate, 16 sail and 5 power boats in all.

What I found particularly interesting about the program this year was that Brian Goodwin, ABYC Technical Director did something this year that we hadn't thought of last year, he actually compiled data on some of the common faults found. This is useful to me because this list gives me plenty of material to work with and harp about for many weeks to come!

For our part at ABYC, we were focusing on some key areas that our standards address, electrical issues, fuel systems, exhaust systems, seacocks, proper labeling, and LPG systems were all on our radar for each of the boats that attended. Most all of the items on our checklist were things I've talked about here on Eds Boat Tips before. That said, because of the frequency of non-compliance found in our relatively small sampling of boats, you're going to get reminded yet again on some of these items. Compliance is important to ensure on board safety!So, here we go, let the chastising begin!

For this week's most common non compliant issue we have GFCI's that either were not installed or not working. As a reminder, these little guys are the electrical outlets with the "trip and Reset" buttons on them. Keep in mind that most boats will have one or maybe two of them that supply downstream outlets in other areas of the boat. It's common for example to have one of the outlets in the galley that supplies an outlet in the head or perhaps up on deck or in an engine room space. All areas of the boat that are required to have GFCI protection to be compliant with ABYC Standards. These outlets also have some fine print on their face, sound advice that nobody ever follows. Take a close look, it says "Test Monthly" somewhere on the front of these outlets. NOBODY DOES THAT!!

I've experimented with this and by tripping and resetting these devices, you actually exercise the mechanical mechanism inside the device. I think the reason they fail so regularly in the marine environment is that the trip mechanism gets corroded and it can't respond as it should. By testing and resetting regularly, I believe that you actually keep the corrosion at bay and the free movement of the parts in good order. The bottom line on our inspection group was a total of 11 out of 21 boats had either faulty GFCI devices or were not compliant in the first place! This is not a good batting average.

Remember these outlets are the thing that's going to save you when you are standing there in wet bare feet and you grab the metal case on your coffee maker some morning that has an internal ground fault. For the price of a new GFCI its just not worth taking a chance.

Stay tuned, we've gathered enough data at this year's safety inspection to offer up several months of chastising and sound advice.

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