Somebody should. I sure haven't been getting a charge. The POS Guest onboard battery charger on Wild Blue died again. We discovered this right before leaving Texas. Circumstances dictated that we needed to head out, and didn't have time to get another charger shipped to us.
We made the trip from Texas to Washington State by using an automotive charger to keep the batteries topped off, and keeping our 12v use to a minimum. It worked fine.
We found the exact charger we were looking for at Cabela's here in Washington; we picked it up on our way to Anacortes. It's a ProMariner Pro-Tournament 30 amp 3-bank smart charger. The model is 300L... the "L" stands for: longer cables. It wasn't until we were up to our armpits in the project that we discovered the L wasn't L enough.
Our neighbor in Texas owns a boat building company. They also do repairs and maintenance. He tells me when someone wants to know how long any small repair will take, he says, "Eight hours." You can start out to just change oil, filters, and plugs (which should take an hour or so)... sure as heck, a plug will strip out, a fuel line will split, the filter won't come off without extreme measures... and by the time you're done messing with it, it will have taken you 8 hours. Not that he can bill the customer for that amount, but that's his (only a little tongue-in-cheek) time estimate.
Joan asked me how long it would take to change out the new battery charger. "Maybe two hours at the outside. It just depends on how long it takes to pull all the wires from the old one out."
Yeah, I was wrong. The new charger's "long" wiring wasn't long enough. I had to splice in some wiring on every line. When the factory laid out the wiring for the old set-up, the interior and cockpit floor wasn't built in place. They had wiring for the charger run this way and that. The conduit that the wiring needs to run through to get from the cabin to the rear of the boat wasn't big enough for the fuse holders on each of the wires... oh, we spent that first two hours trying to fish the wires through, but there were two right angle turns that confounded us with those fuse holders. And, no, I couldn't use the wiring from the old one: those fuses were 15 amp, the ones on the new charger are 40 amp. Plus, the wiring on the new one cannot be connect from the charger unit, so you can't fish it backwards.
The old charger was wired direct to the ac switches - the new one uses a 3 prong plug. No, the plug I bought for it yesterday isn't big enough for this wiring.
We had to remove the coaming box in the cockpit (it was put in with 4200) to get access for the wiring. It takes time to tie-wrap everything in place when all the wiring is run.
Yep... 8 hours. That is with two of us working on it. Joan's hands are smaller than mine, so she can reach places I can't. She's also a lot more flexible than I am. I could not have done this without her... when we were all done, we were able to compare fiberglass gouges... the ones under the fingernails really hurt!
But, it's done. The new charger is "smart"... it is supposed to know when to condition the batteries, when to stop charging, and when to put a float-charge on them. That makes it smarter than me, 'cause I'm not sure when to do all those things.
Yesterday, I wrote about "one task per day"... that was to allow time to walk uptown, have a burger, do some grocery shopping, and visit with friends. We never got off the boat today, except to put stuff on the dock to give us room to work in the cockpit. Russ and Toni did stop by today, so we could trade repair stories... ours was still in progress at the time.
It was raining when we got up this morning, but had turned mostly sunny by the time we started today's project. Just as I was putting away tools and Joan was putting away all the stuff in the cabinets we had to dig under, the rain started again. I'm pretty sure that counts as an EIGHT-HOUR sunbreak! ;-)
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