Hey guys. I was working in the boat yesterday getting it ready for the water. At some point messing around I lost power to my panel. Ignition and motor has power but nothing else. I feel like there should be a fuse somewhere but I couldn’t locate it. Any ideas?
Look near you house battery, follow the red wire leaving the positive terminal, there may be one of those resettable circuit breakers.
It could also be near the fuse panel as well, back track the wire feeding it.
One of these or similar!
Hopefully you can just reset it. Get in there and look around some. Good luck
It looks like there is just a poor connection somewhere. I took the boat out just to run it and sometimes I would get power. More troubleshooting to come…
I would check the lead that goes right to the instrument panel from the fuse panel. You may have just knocked it loose. If not, as Stumpknocker said look for the fuse right near the battery that leads to the console. I have a 30 amp blade fuse so looks different then the resettable one Stumpknocker showed, but if that is tripped then the panel is down, but motor and ignition will still work.
most production boats use a boat hull harness and a console harness, to connect the 2 parts.
there will be a large square plug, most of the time they are white, and sometimes they get stuffed under the deck where all the wires come out of the floor.
find that plug and wiggle it around.
So, I used my meter to check the main terminals coming into the panel. When I check the power before its connected to the panel, I get 12.47V. Once I hook it to the piggyback connector on the first jumper wire - it automatically drops to 11.25V. Is that little of a voltage drop enough to not power anything? Also, I found two ground jumper wires that look like the plastic coating has melted and one shows some copper exposed. Still trying to figure this out…
The first thing I would do is run a temporary jumper from the negative post on the battery to the panel to go around those melted wires.
If the plastic insulation melted then you are getting resistance, probably due to corrosion somewhere, typically at the connections so check those first. Resistance in electrical current turns into heat. The 11.25 v would be enough to light the panel and get your instruments working. Also, if you have two bare wires and they crossed you may have blown a fuse/breaker and that would cut power off to the panel. I don’t think you have a big problem, you just have to find that corrosion, short, blown fuse or break in the current.
What Local said! Also, since the wire to be melted like you said, you may just want to replace the power and ground to the fuse panel. Maybe you have enough wire to cut it back to clean wire and still use what you have. If not, replace with the same size wire that’s there and make sure it is tinned marine rated wire and use heat-shrink terminals. This will save you from the headache of messing with it over and over because of corrosion.
When I say clean wire I mean shiny clean copper under the insulation. If it has started to get to turn black, then replace it and get it over with. Good luck!
Thanks guys. I went ahead and replaced all the circuit breakers and rocker switches and that’s when I found the bare ground jumpers. All but a couple were original and 12 years old. I think I will replace all the hot/ground jumpers now. Probably will be a weekend project.