Electrical

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....

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).

As a subscriber, you have free access to our back-issue archive-more than 2,000 articles. Here are a few topics you might find relevant this season.

The loss in RF coaxial cable increases substantially and quickly, when there is water intrusion. Coax that uses foam dielectric, like RG8X and LMR type coax, is particularly prone to this problem because the water can quickly propagate along the foam dielectric used in these type coaxes.