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Main Electrical Panel

Well Labeled and Perfect Health

When we got the boat, there several issues with the electrical system that we since resolved:

  • The main electrical panel was entirely miswired as many AC connections were cross-wired between the two 30A shore input lines
  • There was a short in one of the heaters to Ground/Earth
  • Not a single AC wire was labeled

All this was fixed and the AC fuse box was rewired with crimped connections and labels on every wire. Since then, we regularly checked for leak current and are always well below the acceptable limit.

Raymarine hybrid touch

The chart plotter is equipped with radar, AIS, quad-depth sounders, rear view camera, multi-view and a few more things. It's a great unit that I used with joy. It also tracked all our cruise outs and with the rear view camera docking and catching moorings ​buoys is a breeze.
The AIS receiver has a nice long range for a power boat without a high mast like a sail boat.

OpenCPN Chart Plotter with AIS

In addition to the Raymarine chart plotter, we installed another chart plotter based on OpenCPN. This runs on a Raspberry Pi 3 with a nice, bright display.
This setup also runs the path following autopilot that allows driving the boat from the harbor across the bay to another location without user intervention - obviously with someone on watch the whole time.

It also features a second AIS receiver to provide redundancy and other other useful information.
There is an ipad mount above the main display that allows viewing (ios) and controlling (android only) the Raymarine chart plotter. A very useful feature to get radar at the lower helm.
The same also works the other way around as the Raspberry Pi provides a wifi network that can be used to remote control OpenCPN using a tablet computer from the upper helm.

Simple and easy to maintain

The installation of the OpenCPN based autopilot system is modular and easy to service with standard components. I wanted to make sure everything is easy to replace in case that should ever become necessary. So far, this has worked flawlessly.

Battery Monitor

One thing that became very apparent early in our boat ownership is that an unknown battery state is absolutely unacceptable. Unfortunately, commercial battery monitors are either trash and support only single batteries or are ​outrageously expensive.
I wanted a solution that gives me an overview of the health of all five batteries and a 24h graph so that I can see whether or not they are charging, at what voltage they are and if something periodically turns on I maybe don't know about that drains my batteries.
The solution was a custom design that takes in all batteries. I turned it on once and it always worked. It's a mandatory piece of equipment and I'm currently designing a new version for our new (to us) boat.
That messy graph shown in the bottom half of the image shows the float charge cycles.

Dual Radio

Flybrige and lower helm have their own radios. The flybridge has an extra hand-set fited for easier access from the copilit seat.

AIS Transceiver

The transceiver on the flybridge is a hobby project a former owner implemented. It works but should probably eventually be completely redone.