Are you Evaporating?....Ed Sherman

Last week I discussed some of the goings on at ABYC Standards week in Orlando. Well I'm back, but I woke up this morning with a few questions for myself....With all that's going on with the EPA's mandates to control evaporative emissions for all manner of things with engines, including boats, when exactly are boat builders supposed to do what to stay on the right side of the law? Its a little confusing.

So, I went to the law that covers Control of Evaporative Emission for "off road" equipment, CFR title 40, part 1060 and looked over the table contained therein that explains this. Let me share it with you:

Several things need some explaining related to the above table. First, the term "SI" simply refers to spark ignition, read, your gasoline fueled engine. Permeation is a term that describes the ability of the fuel vapors to migrate through a material such as fuel hose, or a plastic fuel hose. Fluid doesn't leak, but some vapors do, and yes they evaporate into the atmosphere. The bottom line here is that what has for years been described as a permeation rate of 100 grams/meter squared over a 24 hour period has been reduced to 15 grams /meter squared over a 24 hour period, a significant up specification. The fuel line is currently available, plastic fuel tanks that meet this specification are not yet available, but the vendors basically have until January 1, 2011 to come up with some product.

For those not understanding the term "diurnal", the ABYC describes it this way: "evaporative emissions that occur as a result of venting fuel tank vapors during daily temperature changes while the engine is not operating." This will all be controlled by the charcoal filtration system I mentioned last week.

So, are you evaporating? Right now you are, but as you can see, over the next several years the EPA is going to slow that process down dramatically.

Fuel System Fun.....Ed Sherman

I'm still  at ABYC Standards week. Today I sat in on a session related to fuel systems and the new CARB / EPA requirements which will control evaporative emissions from boats. All I can say is whoaaaaaaa. The room was filled with about 40 engineers that make both boats and fuel system components used on boats. ABYC is developing standards to deal with the new emission requirements coming our way, and provide guidance for boat builders to comply. 

I thought electrical issues were daunting. Now I'm not sure, seems easy as I listen to this group of engineers.

 First of all, this only applies to gasoline fueled boats at the moment, so if you're running a diesel, forget about all of this for now. Secondly, small boats storing less than 12 gallons of fuel appear to be exempt. So, your dinghy or small skiff will probably not be affected, except for the tank, fuel hose and primer bulb. I say probably because much of this is not cut in stone just yet. What is cut in stone is that your permanently installed integral tank fuel system is going to end up having a charcoal filter installed to control evaporative emissions. This would become an integral part of your fuel tank's vent system. You know, the vent you wait to see fuel dripping out of into the water to tell you you've filled your tank to it's fullest capacity...........Forget about that method as we move into the future. It was never an acceptable method, and now the new systems are going to eliminate it as a possibility. To achieve that is no easy task from a design perspective, and it is probably going to add some considerable cost to the boat.

What about outboards with non-integral tanks? Well, the plastic ones may be too permeable, meaning that you can smell fuel around them even though they're not actually leaking raw fuel. So this will mean new formulations for the plastic used to reduce this permeability. How about when you plug the fuel hose onto your engine and a little fuel squirts out just before you get the plug latched to the engine? Not going to be allowed any more. I'm told that at least one engine maker has designed a solution for this.

When all is said and done, we are entering into a new phase for boats that reminds me of the early 1970's (I'm giving away my approximate age here) when emission controls for cars were in their early stages of evolution. It wasn't pretty. All sorts of what we called "driveability" problems were common. The good news is that automotive engineers worked their way through all of this and we are learning and using some of that history and hard earned knowledge as we try to sort our way through this phase for boats. We'll just have to see where we end up. I'm hoping the road ahead won't be too rocky.

ABYC Standards Week............Ed Sherman

For those of you not familiar with the ABYC, (American Boat & Yacht Council) we're the group that develops and writes Standards that apply to the building, service and repair of your boat. This is a very dynamic area that with new technology being developed is changing all of the time. This week I'm here in Orlando, Florida attending a series of meetings of what we call Project Technical Committees, or PTC's for short. This week we are reviewing some important Standards that address electrical systems, fuel systems and hull performance on your boat. Although I can't share with you every minute detail we are discussing because much of what we are discussing is in draft format or still requiring more research before its ready for prime time, I can share with you some of the topic areas to give you a feel for the range of coverage we deal with. I'll begin with the last three days as we just closed out our day three meeting.

Monday we bagan our review of what I often refer to as our "foundation" electrical Standard, ABYC E-11, which covers the basic wiring and general electrical equipment installation on your boat. This Standard covers both battery powered systems up to 50 volts DC and Shore power AC systems. At over 70 pages, its a bit of a rough read for the uniniated, covering everything from what type of wire to use, how to determine what size wire is needed, over-current protection for the electrical circuits on your boat to how you might determine if one of your electrical terminations is done correctly. Let me give you a sampling of the issues we are currently grappling with here.

• Boat owners' increasingly adding more and more batteries to their boats to supply such things as inverters and general house loads. The issue here is the fact that as battery capacity gets increased, over-current protection requirements must be increased and the debate is first, what types of devices might do the job and secondly where these devices need to be installed to actually function as they should. We're at the point today where many boats have enough battery capacity to generate enough power to arc weld if a short circuit were to occur. Scary stuff.
• Besides the general upsizing of battery capacity, we're now beginning to see more boats utilizing Lithium based batteries to supply power. Remember the stories about people burning their kneecaps with their Lithium laptop batteries? Well the units we're seeing being installed on boats have enough short circuit potential to light up a small town right now. Currently there are no industry standards in place that address where or how to install these batteries to minimize any potential risk associated with a fault in one of these systems. We're working on it.
• Battery chargers and inverters have advanced technologically in recent years to accomodate the needs of AGM, Gel cell and other more commonly used battery chemistry. We need to update our Standards relative to these types of devices to coincide with the newest developments.
• Network systems are becoming more and more popular on new boats. We need Standards to ensure that these systems continue to function, especially when integrated with more traditional wiring schemes on boats. The convergance of electrical and electronic systems is creating a whole new array of potential problems that need sorting out, with recommendations made to minimize or totally eliminate the potential for problems with this convergence.
• Power co-generation and power conversion. Common on super yachts, and widely used in Europe for some time, this is new technology as far as the US is concerned with many potentially dangerous scenarios playing out if these systems are not installed correctly. We should have a standard ready to go for these systems by the end of this year.
• High voltage DC propulsion systems, common to hybrid systems beginning to become quite popular have some major safety concerns to address. We have a technical infomation report in place now (TE-30) to provide guidance in this area. It is included in the latest version (2009-2010) of the ABYC book Standards and Recommended Practices.

Tomorrow, I begin two days of meetings to learn what's up with our friends at CARB and how fuel systems are about to change dramatically. Yup, you guessed it, emission controls for your boat. Friday I'll let you know what I learn.

Introducing the ELCI.................Ed Sherman

One of the projects I've been working on for the last five years is lobbying for a requirement for an important new safety device that would be installed on all new boats and hopefully will get retro-fitted to old boats as well. The device is known as an ELCI, an acronym for "electrical leakage circuit interrupter". The concept here is nothing new, in fact boats built in other countries outside of the US have been employing similar devices for years, which is really what got me on to the idea. Basically I asked a simple question, is the rest of the world wrong and the US right in all of this? As I began to hear more and more about in water electrical shock deaths around boats, especially in marinas, I began to believe that we were off base and the rest of the boating world was right on target.

You already have similar devices installed in your home and on your boat, they're known as GFCI's or ground fault circuit interrupters. A photo of one is shown here and if you look really closely, you can just see the corrosion seeping out of the terminals.

Most of the GFCI units out there now have a small label on them that tells you to "test monthly". My comfort level is always reduced because I know nobody ever tests these things as part of a monthly routine, either at home or on their boat, and they do fail. The trouble is they don't fail in the open circuit mode, i.e. so the power is shut off. They fail in such a way that they won't do what you need them to do in the case of a short circuit from an appliance to its case. These devices are supposed to prevent you from getting electrocuted! Testing them monthly actually exercises the mechanical mechanism inside the unit so that it will react in a timely manner when needed to shut off the power to the appliance plugged into the socket. Without this periodic exercise, they sometimes start to stick and corrode to a point where the mechanical mechanism can't move to shut the power down.

The primary difference between the GFCI in your bathroom or kitchen and the ELCI I'm introducing here is the amperage level they trip at. The units in your house or on your boat are engineered to trip at a nominal 5 milliamps (mA), the ELCI that effective in July of this year will be required equipment on new boats is engineered to trip at 30 milliamps. You will still be required to have the 5 mA units in places like your head or galley area on the boat, but these 30 mA units will be required on your shore power system as it comes into your boat.

You might be thinking, hey why don't the marina people just put a GFCI in the circuit supplying my boat and be done with it? That's the rub, the 5 mA trip level is just too low in most cases to be effective. They would likely be nuisance tripping quite often. You see many of the typical appliances on your boat have some inherant, low level ground fault leakage already, not enough to shock you but leakage non-the-less. Battery chargers and motor circuits are classic examples of circuits where some low level leakage may occur normally. This leakage current is cumulative within the grounding system on your boat and on the dock. Five battery chargers and ten motor circuits all tied to the same grounding circuit might just trip a regular GFCI device on a regular basis. Hence, the 30 mA trip level of the ELCI. This specification incidently is the same as the devices used in Europe, New Zealand and Australia already. The 30 mA value is a good compromise between nuisance tripping and electrical shock hazard safety. What do these new devices look like? Two are shown below, one for a 30 amp shore power circuit and one for a 50 amp service.

The above units will either be mounted on the main AC distribution panelboard on your boat or may be located in a separate box somewhere near the shore power inlet to the boat, depending upon access limitations.

What's the problem? Why do I need this thing anyhow?

The problem here centers itself around the way in which boats today are wired. You see a modern boat is wired with all of its grounding system connected, both the AC and DC sides of you electrical system are connected. This is as it should be for several reasons. One is that by doing this an alternate path for ground fault current leakage ends up being established with the water the boat is floating in. Originally, this was thought to be a good option because even if the dock wiring had a faulty ground, the fault current would leak out of your boat and find a path back to the source of power and trip a regular circuit breaker, shutting the power down. A second reason is that by connecting everything together, corrosion issues are minimized, a way too complex topic to discuss as part of this entry. The idea here is that if your electric water heater devellops a short circuit to ground, the fault current will go through the green wire grounding circit back to its power source and trip the breaker, minimizing the risk of you touching the metal case of the heater and getting zapped by 120 volts of AC power. This is all well and good, but there is a problem. You see the heater in this example might be protected by a 15 or 20 amp circuit breaker, which in fact may never trip because the short circuit is of low quality simply meaning that the fault connection to the case of the heater might be very highly resistive and not able to conduct the full current supplied. You need to know that one amp of electrical current is enough to kill you if it travels through your heart, that's right one, uno.  Hence, the 30 mA trip level for the ELCI. 30 mA (there are 1000 mA in one amp) will certainly be fealt, but it won't stop your heart. Its important to note here that all of the shock incidents we have documented have occured in fresh water, none in salt water. So, what's up with that?

You see fresh water is actually a rather poor conductor of electricity, salt water is really a good conductor. When electrical leakage current enters into a freshwater environment it has to struggle to find a path back to its source, typically along the surface of the water. Saltwater, being a good conductor dissipates the leakage current rather rapidly. In a freshwater scenario, the fault current forms a gradient on the surface that moves around the source boat. If a swimmer enters into this fault gradient, the current will enter the swimmers body at one point and exit at another. If the current path includes the person's heart (quite likely), the heart muscle can seize, you know the rest of the story......

The ELCI will shut down the power to a boat if a low level, but not too low, fault occurs, eliminating stray leakage current from entering into the water the boat sits in. The fault will then be noticed, traced and the faulty component replaced.

You're going to hear a lot more about these new devices over the next few years. If you buy a new boat built in 2010, it'll have one installed. If your boat is built before this year, get one installed or DIY. I'll be providing more information and a bunch of DIY instructions in posts this Spring as people get ready for the upcoming boating season and the ELCI's become more readily available in the market place, but please, consider this as a must have upgrade to your existing shorepower system, I'm really sick of hearing about people getting killed swimming around their boats.

Speed Bump To Love...Ed Sherman

Continuing with some ideas that Bayliss Boat Works employ is a look at the speed bump to love. Well I loved it anyhow. Not the sort of thing that gets most people excited, but it got me going because I have at least a rudimentry feel for what can work under the waterline. What I can't understand is why more builders don't adopt this concept. At the design and hull build phase this does not seem too hard to do. The bump I'm referring to here is found on the leading edge of the bow thruster tube and shown below.

Well ok, maybe its more than just a bump, there's an indent too. But this just gives you more of a look at the attention to detail Bayliss puts into their boats. The idea here is to not let the opening for the bow thruster tube to act like a scoop, upsetting the water flow over the surface of the hull. As the boat moves forward, the bump nicely diverts the flow slightly above the surface and effectively sends it aft into the perfectly faired indent on the trailing edge of the tube opening and back along the hull surface. the concept here is to minimize any drag created by the hole in the side of the boat. I love the idea. It seems to me it should do a great job of improving the boat's performance or at least any reduction in performance that a thruster tube might create. This may seem like a small thing on a boat that's sporting at least 1000 horsepower, probably closer to 2000 horsepower, but what about a sailboat where drag really matters? I'm not sure I've seen anything quite like this on a sailboat with a bow thruster...........Just a thought.