Back in the saddle again...

 Kerm here,

The battery charger install was a challenge.  The old charger had wires about a quarter the size and did not have circuit protection at the batteries as code requires.  When I built the new battery box last year I did not leave enough room for all the breakers, fuses and switches that are required for the main DC system plus the upgraded battery charger.  The old system had either none, were painfully undersized or just plain c**p components.  The photo below was my solution but again, I did not leave enough room to do it as well as I would have liked. 

The circuit breaker / switches are for the alternator main run, house batteries and engine battery. The thing in the middle controls the alternator charging for both circuits.  The plastic covers are over the fuses for the battery charger circuits.  Ain't no mo room.  Have to get a bigger boat if something comes up.  To service the batteries the cover with the holes hinges up and I added a prop to keep it up when doing my due diligence.  The black squares are non slip as this is where I step when getting down into the engine room.  Nice touch if I do say so myself plus I had been carrying that c**p around in the boat for years and I wanted to get rid of it once and for all. 

After firing up the system all worked well and we're finally getting a good charge on the batteries and with the remote feature we can keep an eye on the capacity and health of them.  Done.

Now the propane monitor / safety system.  Last summer I installed a propane fume monitor/alarm combined with a solenoid valve.  We don't want to wake up dead or blow the boat up.  Problem is/was that the sensor is so sensitive that we get a lot of false alarms that trigger a painfully loud alarm and the propane shuts off which tends to ruin the souffle.  After several phone calls to the manufacturer and 'interwebing' the problem we're moving the sensor.  It seems that there are just too many smells in the bilge that set it off.  So more wiring as we will be moving it to the sleeping area although I wonder about smelly socks.

While there are a multitude of other small electrical and mechanical fix ups plus fluid changes that are on the list I'm moving on to cosmetics as the UV and salt is setting us back a couple of steps.  The next boat will not have wood anywhere.  It may have the pizazz of a plastic bathroom shower stall but I won't need even one piece of sandpaper on board, nor varnish, nor stain, nor chisels, nor routers, nor doweling equipment, nor saws and on and on...  What do those people do on those boats anyway?