On Aug 24, 7:14 am, "Roger Long" wrote:
Am I reading this right? All of the charging and alternator belt problems
you and Larry were chasing around and entertaining us with endlessly were
because power was being improperly diverted to the strips?

--
Roger Long

No, I still have to (again/more) realign the alternator bracket. It's
in line but twisted - it will require an s-curve in the aft bracket to
bring it in line.

Geoff: Yes, it's a Xantrex C40 (well, was - I'll not do it again - see
my reply to Dave Skolnick in the loglist). I'd thought I'd specified
to John (Hotwire enterprises, the vendor and installer) that I didn't
want Xantrex stuff, but it was in the time of the inverter
discussions. That said, our new shorepower charger is an X, the
better of the two in that range when I went to replace the monster
which had been in there, so we'll see how that works out. If it craps
out right away, I'll take it back to worst, but since I'll use it so
infrequently, we might not see a failure for several years!

Most likely it got wet at some time along the way; I don't think the
controller was the problem all along, because I don't think the
strips were hot, all the time. Likely it was just the long-term
neglect/abuse the batteries had been seeing, and it took some time to
bring them back up by exercising them regularly.

Back to the diverter, perhaps it was that, after all, which was giving
us grief. However, I think the controller went TU only recently.
That said, things are well with the battery and charging systems,
now. The tweaking I still have to do on the alternator isn't
preventing it from sending us lots of amps, but the twist in the
orientation of the pulley is going to kill the current belt; I know
how to fix it, and will, so that problem will have gone away as well.

The problems cited in this most recent post are sort of par for the
course, I think, and other than a joke about the hot water (and, of
course, the bit about having no water aboard that we didn't carry in a
jug), even that was just one of those things. During our refit, I
employed a kid to make up many connections in the ER while I was doing
reefer building. That was one of his; the nipple through the
compression fitting wasn't long enough, and the extremely hot water
softened the plastic enough that it blew it out. Just redoing that
joint fixed that problem. Not mentioned in all the other more
significant stuff way earlier was another of his joints which leaked.
I fixed that one, too, but it was when the ER was nearly empty, making
access much easier!

So, we'll continue our cruising - likely there will be less exotic
places than Cape May, but it makes a good tag line :{))

L8R

Skip, off to Sandy Hook in nearly calm forecast winds and small seas.
We'll see how well they do this time...