So, a week passed after we had finished our April fishing trip and I happened to be outside checking on the boat in the late dusk. I noticed a red LED blinking on the flybridge so I went to check it out. Turns out it was one of the smaller LCDs that has been mounted up there and it has a low DC alarm function on it whereby it blinks this LED if the house battery is low.
So I go in and look at the DC and the damned thing is down at 6 volts. Anyone who does much with batteries knows this is not a good thing and it is very easy to shorten the life of a lead acid battery by allowing it to have low voltage for any length of time at all.
So the problem was that the manufacturer of the power pedestal really did not use a marine type connection for the power plugs. In other words, there was no locking collar per below.
Sure, it looks all boaty and yellow in the pictures But what good is that water seal lid to the plug when the standard usage model is to leave the cables plugged in 99.9% of the time? As you can see, there is no place to screw on any kind of marine locking collar.
That means that the only thing holding this heavy 30 amp connector into the socket is the tiny flange on one (1) of the 3 prongs of the cable. That's it. And in this case, the cable that was carrying AC voltage to the onboard battery charger was just barely hanging in the socket making partial connection.
It's a good thing there was not much electrical load on the cable because these connectors are notorious for arcing due to poor contact and that causes them to burn up. In fact, this is what happened to us when the boat was still in Virginia. We allowed our helper to live on the boat for a couple months and he had a space heater going. He must not have fully locked the connector into place and when he got up in the morning the cable had burned clean in half and this is what it looked like when I went to fix it. This is about as close to burning a boat up as you can get without actually doing it.
Since this has been a known problem for the boating industry for quite some time, some manufacturers are coming up with new plugs. We bought these so called Smart Plugs and matching female inlet receptacles for the boat side but until recently were planning on leaving the power pedestal side with the legacy 30 amp connectors. But after almost destroying our house battery, I'd had enough.
A couple months ago on a dump run I saw a couple of very heavy refrigeration "holdover plates" that had been dropped off as trash. I recognized good marine stainless when I saw it so I snagged the 2 units with the thought that I would cannibalize the sheet stainless later. Well, later is today. I cut some nice strips out of the unit with my angle grinder so I could fix the crappy power situation on the power pedestal.
I removed the 30 amp socket from one side and then made a face plate out of that stainless. I installed two PVC conduit elbows and then cut off the old 30 amp plugs and hard wired it all together as shown below.
I gooped it all up with silicone sealant and screwed the face plate to the aluminum power pedestal.
The end result is below. That will be the last of the problems we see on the power pedestal side. Yes, this does mean that these 25' cables cannot be taken with me when we stay the night at other marinas but I will be handling that with longer cables since 25' is never enough at a marina. I'll just get a 50 amp cordset and always leave that cable on the boat.
But wait, there is more! The original power pedestal put these 30 amp outlets on opposite sides of the pedestal but I modified it so both cables now come out on the boat side of the pedestal. And it just so happens that I had a nice outdoor enclosure for a GFCI outlet and so I used that to cover the hole on the far side of the pedestal while also now having a convenient place to plug in electrical cords for tools, etc.
As a bonus, the pedestal light even illuminates the GFCI box...
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