Captain’s Log: Entropy Rules

This isn’t the column that was supposed to run this week. The column for this week had a definite woodsy feel to it — I went ahead and pushed it to next week, wherein you’ll get to learn all about how to clean and preserve teak wood. This column, the column that replaces the all wood extravagana I had planned for you, is all about entropy, electrical systems, and the problem with owning a fifty year old boat.
The problem with owning a fifty year old boat is that things break on it all the freaking time. Mind you, not anything that matters. The core of my boat is very solid, and at next haul out I intend on making her even more solid by removing through-hulls that are not needed anymore since my boat is all electric. Diesel inboard engines require water to cool them and usually use through hulls to pump water from outside through the engine and then out with the exhaust. My boat does none of that, but it does have its own problems.
One thing I discovered about living on a body of salt water is that the salt air destroys everything metal eventually. As it took me a short while to learn this lesson and the first project I did 7 years ago was rewiring my entire boat, there are parts of the system that are starting to fail. While I was doing the teak prep work, the original battery charger that came with the boat died. All work stopped until I had a solution in place.
It’s a bit of a testament to my electrical system that I didn’t notice this failure for about four days. This is when I noticed my battery level meter at about three quarters of where it should be. I had to tear apart the cabin to get at the battery charger, but when I did all the testing revealed — it was quite dead. Rest in peace, dual battery ten amp charger. I pulled out my spare battery charger.

Who keeps a spare battery charger? People who depend on banks of batteries, that’s who. I have three banks of battery systems on my boat. The first battery system, the one I have well documented, is what I call the House Battery Bank. This consists of two 12 volt AGM deep cycle batteries that I salvaged from a large computer UPS at a local colocation facility. Together, these batteries are about 400 amp hours of storage. I have them wired together in parallel so they provide a steady 12 V to all the house functions such as running lights, cabin lights, radios, water pump, macerator, and instruments. I’ve tested the system with conservative use it will last for a week. I am slowly replacing the old lights with LEDs to make it last even longer — the last light to be replaced will probably be the anchor light on top of the mast, for obvious reasons.
When you do things like this, you find problems where nobody was expecting them. One of the problems I’ve found to be aware of when refitting a boat like this is that LEDs generate a bit of RF interference. The only reason it should affect anyone is if the interference is on boat channels. The best way to test this is to lower the squelch on your radio all the way, then turn your lights on and off. If your radio makes a bunch of noise when you turn on the lights, you’ve got some problems. Channels to really test are 16 and 14 — those are the emergency channels and if the Coast Guard cannot hear you because of RF interference you could die. The only fix at present is not running the lights and the radio at the same time.
This might be a good time to mention my lighting system. But I really want to mention why the battery charger dying on me didn’t surprise me. A lot of the connections from when I first set up the boat are dying merely because I used hardware that was not meant for the salty environment. Salt(NaCl, sodium chloride, etc.) is extremely corrosive when combined with water, and I fight it even with some systems that are meant to take this environment. Don’t believe everything advertised as “marine speakers” if you want to improve your boat stereo, for example. Everyday items such as kitchen utensils and cookware can fall apart after a couple of months on a boat if they are cheaply made with pot metal. And speaking of radios, I bought a cheap Baofeng ham radio that I modified to broadcast on marine VHF bands as a backup radio — and after three months of no use on the boat, the battery pack swelled and corroded, and the circuit boards in the radio swelled and came apart. Good thing that was only $25.

The electrical system is evolving, and will probably be the subject of a lot of the updates to this log. The aforementioned lighting system is part of the bigger project of bringing wifi to the boat, believe it or not. A wifi system on the boat is not the craziest thing, since a lot of newer yachts have small local area networks set up for gauges and instruments. The same is true for my boat — my goal is to set up a wireless system for instruments such as wind, speed, depth, and other critical things a sailboat might need. The impetus for doing it wirelessly is simply the age of the boat. As mentioned before, I rewired the entire boat myself. I had to because someone else ripped out the electrical system a long time ago. This boat’s electrical was installed by laminating the wiring into the bulkheads, so they just cut it all out where it went into those. I still find remnants of this system when I crawl into the depths of the boat. I want to eliminate as many wires as possible and leave them to critical systems such as running lights and instruments.
But these are all subjects of future logs. Tune in next week, when I tell you way more about teak than you’ll ever want to know.
