Loss of electrical power, batteries good

[thunder550]

Boat is a 2003 Tige 22V. Had this happen the last two times out at the lake.

I have two batteries in the boat, tied through a 1/2/All/Off battery switch. Both batteries were charged and tested before our last outing. I had battery #2 selected at the time, and tried to start an electric air pump to blow up a tube, plugged in to the cigarette lighter on the dash below the ignition switch. The pump started up, and died immediately. Once that happened, the boat lost all electrical power. No crank with the key, no accessories powering on, nothing. The only hint of electrical power left was the TAPS actuator trying to return to startup position upon key-on.

I dug around for awhile, checked all the fuses and breakers that I could find. No bad fuses, no tripped breakers. Tried switching to battery #1 (which was good), no change. Selected "all" on the battery switch, no change. Finally decided to turn the ignition with the key and try to jumper the starter solenoid to get the engine to start. As soon as I touched the positive battery lead to the solenoid power, EVERYTHING electrical on the boat came back on. From then on, it would start just fine with the key.


I started the engine, put the drive in neutral and ran the RPM's up to make sure that the alternator was charging fully, then tried to run the air pump off the cigarette lighter again. Whatever it was that kicked off the first time (breaker??) kicked off again, and the engine died immediately. Same symptoms...no electrical power to anything. Did the same thing with jumpering the starter solenoid, and it all came back on fine again.

What the hell is going on????

[thunder550]

Bump, anyone got any ideas?

[samw]

I would say it's the main I think 50 amp circuit breaker on top of the engine. The RED one. If I remember right if it trips all power is gone. I am sure everyone else will chime in here soon on this topic.

[jwanck11]

Replacing the Cigarette lighter assembly is very cheap and might solve your issues.

[rogersbm82]

Yes that breaker (big red button) on the engine does kill everything but I believe you have to physically reset it to come back on. It shouldn't reset when you jump the soleniod. Maybe I am wrong, hopefully someone will chime in. But I would say the main problem is the outlet or maybe the pump is getting shorted to ground somewhere.

[thunder550]

I did try resetting the big breaker multiple times. It never tripped. That's the thing that is throwing me off....whatever it is that's killing power to the entire boat is not a fuse or a standard breaker. Whatever it is reset once I jumpered the battery lead to the starter solenoid. I guess what I may have to do is bring the boat home and get it to kill power like it did, then take a multimeter to it and find out where the power is stopping.

[thunder550]

Replacing the Cigarette lighter assembly is very cheap and might solve your issues.

I'll have to try one of the other cigarette lighter plugs too and see if it reacts the same way. I also need to try the air pump on something else, like maybe in my car and see what happens.

[jwanck11]

those are easy tests that might tell you a whole lot. You can also swap around the power outlets to make sure it is not the wiring in a specific spot...

[lee]

Did you check the battery connections to make sure all are tight? Did you check the battery selector switch to make sure all conections are tight? Did you check the wires on the starter to see if all where tight?

[thunder550]

Did you check the battery connections to make sure all are tight? Did you check the battery selector switch to make sure all conections are tight? Did you check the wires on the starter to see if all where tight?

Yes, I checked all of those. All were good.

I haven't had a chance to work on the boat yet....hopefully in the next week or so. Been busy putting a new engine in my truck

[laserfish]

Make sure you don't have a direct short in the wiring of that outlet. Have you tried the pump on another lighter outlet? Use a volt meter to check and make sure the ground side is not hot on the outlet.

[thunder550]

Ok I did a bunch of testing, and worked on the problem with success.

First, the air pump was good. I tested it on another vehicle and it worked just fine.

Second, it did not matter which outlet I put it on in the boat, they all had the same effect.

Finally, I got under the dash and dug around quite a bit with a multimeter, trying to figure out where all the different wires went and how they were all connected.

What I found out was that whoever designed the wiring systems on these boats (or mine, at least) did a really shitty job. I was in disbelief at how many items were daisy-chained together and all tied to the 12v power feed for the instrument panel at the ignition switch. Power came from the battery to the switch, the split off from the switch to the horn, cigarette lighter plugs, and on to some of the other switches for lights, blower, etc. There was a key-on power wire running to the first gauge, then daisy-chained to the rest. Perfect pass was wired to the positive post of the voltage gauge. All in all, it was a giant mess of daisy-chained wiring.

I started off by testing the voltage at the ignition switch. With ignition off, I read about .2v lower than I did at the battery. Not too bad of a voltage drop, considering the length and size of the wire that runs to the switch from the batteries. However, as soon as the ignition switch was turned on, the voltage dropped by almost 2.5v. This is why my voltage gauge on the dash would always read in the 10's or (on a good day) 11's, even when the batteries were charging fine. The ground system was equally bad.

My solution was to run a separate power feed to run some of the higher-draw and dealer-add items (perfect pass). I already have 1/0 gauge wiring run into the compartment under the windshield on the left side of the boat for my amps, so I added a 4 gauge power and ground wire that run under the walkway and over to the driver's side under the dash. I put in two distribution blocks, one for power and one for ground. A relay switched off the original power setup switches power on for the key-on accessories, which get their power feed from the new wires. The other accessories, such as the horn and cigarette lighter plugs, all run to a 12v constant off the new power feeds. I also used the ground distribution block to tie into the original ground setup under the dash, so now it has two paths to take back to the batteries.

Everything seems to work very well now. The voltage gauge reads correctly, and I was able to use the same air pump that killed the boat the first time without any issues at all. I believe that this will fix all of the electrical issues I was experiencing...too bad Tige didn't do this from the factory. The original power and ground feed wires, coupled with the way everything is daisy-chained together, makes for an incredibly crappy way to set all of that stuff up.

[R&T Babich]

Our boat was wired up very similar. Surely, not an optimal design.
I added a second power feed, 14 gauge, from an aux battery to the dash 12v outlets, horn and shower. All new gauges/PP are run to the feed on the ignition switch. So far no problems.