Vlog 365: Wireloose Technology
With the weather nearly warm enough to be working at the boatyard on my Microplus 600 cabin cruiser, Twiggy, again, I decided to get a ‘straightforward’ (?!) job out of the way and remove the old and rather odd leisure battery setup. This had for some reason been installed under the sink and comprised three batteries of two different sizes but there was a surprise or two as I took them out.
Just to be safer, you should have taken off your watch before starting this job.
A bit scary David. Why didn’t you isolate (disconnect) the + and – leads from the batteries first though?
The first thing to do is *not* disconnect the batteries but disconnect the solar charge controller because they hate trying to feed power to a battery that isn’t there. Therefore the controller must be switched off first, before the batteries are disconnected.
Conventionally this would be done by turning off an isolator between solar panel and controller and then an isolator between controller and battery. In this case, neither such isolators existed. I therefore had to disconnect the controller by removing the wires from the solar panel to the controller and the wires from the controller to the battery.
It can be correctly argued that by removing solar panel supply wires, the controller would now be “off” and therefore I should then be able to remove the battery terminal connections so as to make the system “dead” before proceeding any further. (In fact I did err here by taking off the solar supply wires after the battery ones so my whole point about preserving the charge controller is moot but that’s beside the point)
I would strongly argue that trying to take all three battery negatives off simultaneously while ensuring no cross conections were made (which, given the state of the wiring, was not a given) especially since the negatives were at the back of the cupboard up against the hull, so I’d be working across the top of the batteries (and the +ve terminals) was more risky than simply doing a very careful removal of the wires at the charge controller side and ensuring those wires stayed well out of contact with each other. Which I did.
Having done that the only things left in the circuit were: the batteries, the (open) thermal cut out switch on the positive side, and the fuse box. With the switch open, the fuse box was not live but as you saw, I disconnected the cut-off switch next anyway.
Doing this (removing the +ve wire to the cut-off switch) was neglible risk since the wire wasn’t going to magically levitate itself up to connect to the battery negatives. That done, the fuse box was inherently also now disconnected and could be safely removed. Which I did.
With the cut-off switch, solar controller and fuse box removed, only the batteries remained and now I could attend to the spaghetti connections on the terminals which again, in my opinon, warranted individual careful removal.
Blimey! Wished I hadn’t asked now!
Thank you so much for your series and insights.
My wife and I always enjoy your videos and can’t wait for more.
Twiggy seems to have a number of issues and could be a training series on what no to do on a boat (or anything, really).
Best wishes on the resurrection of Twiggy, but …
Best regards,
JD Barron
Haha very much so! Cheers