Electrical

Marine boat batteries can fail due to various reasons, and understanding these potential failure modes is crucial for ensuring their reliability. Here are some...

One of the often overlooked maintenance items in the pre-season rush to the water is the AC shorepower system. Over the years of surveying, Ive amassed a small collection of scary photos from past surveys showing the common examples of neglect to this critical system.

Many used cruising sailboats on the market will have a couple of solar panels, a wind turbine, or possibly both. But are they working?...

Our 2004 Privilege 435 Confianza (Connie for short) came equipped with traditional lead-acid batteries—5 100ah for the house bank and 2 starter batteries. We...

Your dock neighbor just switched out her old 12-volt lead-acid batteries for lithium-ion batteries. Should you? The lithium solution will be more expensive, but...

Volt meters, ammeters, and bank monitors can all give you part of the story, but only a draw-down test, performed over 6-24 hours will...

Batteries and solar panels can be a black box. We can’t see or hear or feel what is going on inside. They’re not complicated...

HIGH PRAISE FOR CARL ALBERG Regarding your report “Small-boat Dreams and Carl Alberg’s Classic Daysailers,” my first sailboat, 25 years ago, was a Pearson Electra....

Connecting two wires is simple; a crimp butt connector using a ratchet crimper, and adhesive lined heat shrink in damp locations, where there is...

The human body runs on electricity and if you overload the nervous system with an external field, everything goes haywire. Every year several people die because they go swimming near a dock, a wiring fault creates an electric field in the water, and their muscles freeze. It is called Electric Shock Drowning (ESD).