Quick help???

[MJO21]

Just started our weekend at table rock. Boat is in the water and running great. I notice my tab switch doesn’t work. Keep driving and go to turn the radio on. Radio does not work. Horn does not work. auxiliaries for cigarette lighter do not work.


Any quick recommendations.

[MJO21]

My battery was dead and Wednesday. I hooked it up to the battery charger and it took a full charge.

[MJO21]

Also none of the navigation or cockpit lights worked.

But when we turn the battery switch to both batteries everything worked.
Thoughts???

[freeheel4life]

Sounds like a dead house battery and the cranking is doing all the work. Did you take the batteries out when you charged them or charged in boat with built in charger??

[Bakes5]

low voltage situation. Alternator is crapping out or a wire is loose to the alternator. Taps was always the first thing to go on mine and a clear signal to get back to the dock pronto. double check all your wires. I had wires break near the alternator and had a big wire that went to the batteries pop out of the lug another time. All in all, I had 4 "my alternator is not doing it's job" situations over the 8 summers I had my 98 2200v. 2 were wiring fixes and 2 were dead alternators. Fortunately, both are easily fixed. Alternator is totally doable even floating on the water....assuming you have a spare

[chpthril]

House battery is dead for sure. Bad battery likely, unless you dont turn the switch off and there is a draw.

[tunafoot]

does your boat have a battery isolator/ combiner? The BattCom went bad in mine and wouldn't charge my house battery. I swapped it out with a BlueSeas ACR and haven't had any issues since

[IDBoating]

Somewhat related and interesting story....

As many of you know, we manufacture sensors for the marine industry. Two of the new products we introduced this year talk on the boat's CAN network, and obviously are powered from the battery. "Because we could", we added sensing of the battery voltage and report "low battery voltage" to the helm electronics via a CAN message. Our sensors work all the way down to 7-8VDC, far below anything reasonable, but after talking with battery companies about what threshold they would consider a problem we set the level at 11.5VDC, below which we transmit the warning. Just a little firmware feature that cost nothing but was useful during development, and we left it enabled in production.

A while after we started shipping those sensors in volume, we got a call asking about a weird CAN message our sensors were generating. (We did list it in the documentation, but who reads the manual anymore, right?) Turned out having that warning message helped explain a whole BUNCH of problems they'd been having. Seems that lots of the other electronics in wakeboats (I'll omit the brand names to protect the guilty!) simply ASSUME a clean 12-14VDC and no design effort was made to properly handle an undervoltage condition.

This customer now uses our "bad battery" message to put a suitable warning up on the helm. Maybe if more companies did that, folks would have time to react before things started shutting down with no explanation....

[Jetter]

does your boat have a battery isolator/ combiner? The BattCom went bad in mine and wouldn't charge my house battery. I swapped it out with a BlueSeas ACR and haven't had any issues since

This might be a REALLY dumb question but exactly what do these things do? Do they replace the old 1 - 2 - off - both switches? Do they isolate one battery for starting the boat and the other(s) for accessories? I have one as well but not sure exactly how it's hooked up or what it's function is.

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[chpthril]

@jetter

The Battcom and Blueseas devices are electronic voltage sensing isolator combiners. What you have pictured is a more simple diode type isolator. The diode allows alternator charge to flow to both banks, but no current draws from each bank, can pull from the other banks. The voltage sensing devices do basically the same operation, just using small processor that monitors the bank and input voltage. They both have pros and cons.

Neither setup replaces or eliminates a with.