Maintenance NMEA 2000

Today our ship will make a step forward into a new generation of electronic systems. I will install a new generation bus system, NMEA 2000. This bus is quite practical because it interconnects all instruments and exchanges all information (wind, speed, log, gps, ais, autopilot, and engine supervision). This is a great advantage (only one cable) and at the same time its biggest disadvantage. There is absolutely no redundancy. If this bus fails all instruments, except the plotter fail. The solution is an old fashion Forumo GPS as backup. Later I have to replace step by step the vdo sl instruments.

Maintenance Electric System 230V

If an electric circuit fails, the troubleshooting can be very time consuming. Basically our installation is well done, but all adds or changes over the last 25 years were badly executed. There is no point in having a box with circuit breakers when things are connected straight to the main service battery. 

Here the steps of improvements:

- clean up the existing cabling; remove everything which is not needed.

- replace the connectors, or place the right connectors in case of blank cabling used. 

- in long term nothing connected straight to the battery. 

A second big step is the 230V circuit. Actually there is only a 230V plug connected to the battery charger and some schuko plugs in parallel. No circuit breaker or emergancy switch. For secutity reasons I don't want to mix up 12V and 230V in the same switching table so I decided to install a new second box. 

The 230V switching box should in first order have a main circuit breaker (FI), dedicated fuses for every circuit (charger and some plugs) and a relay to switch between shorepower and the 12/230V onboard converter. 

230V circuit breakers