Velorum #215: Hot Boat Yoga

I suppose I could have picked a better time to do the electrical job, but because the full re-wire was not initially planned, I had to get it done when it was absolutely stifling inside the boat. Most of the work took place early in the morning before it got too hot, but this afternoon I decided I just wanted it done, so heat be damned.

I won't go into too much detail on running wire, but I decided to run dedicated duplex wiring to each appliance to make it easier to troubleshoot down the line and to provide additional chafe protection from the outer sheathing. All the cables were secured and bundles in runs with zip ties and split loom conduit where feasible.

For the wire size, all the pumps and anything that draws over 5 amps I used 10 AWG marine tinned duplex Ancor wiring. For the smaller appliances such as navigation lights, shower fan, bilge blower, and the holding tank monitor, I used 16 AWG. The wiring running to the mast (and in the mast) is marine triplex 16AWG that shares a common ground. The reason I did this is because the 2 appliances on the mast are combination units (anchor/tricolor lights and steaming/foredeck lights). It also adds more protection because it has a very thick sheathing and is generally more convenient than running single wires.

All told it took me close to three weeks and close to 300 feet of wire working for a few hours before work each morning. A lot of time was spent trying to figure out the best run for a particular wire or bundle off wires. Even more time was spent trying to wiggle into corners and underneath the cockpit sole to run and secure the wiring. Once I found a suitable location to run the wiring, I would pull from the spool starting at the navigation station and loosely set it. Then I'd work my way back to the navigation station securing the run with zip ties and screwed to bulkheads.

Once all the wiring runs were done, it was time to start the real work: connecting everything to the terminal blocks and negative bus bar and ultimately to the new distribution panel. It was a pleasant change from the boat yoga exercises I had been doing and it involved mostly sitting at the nav station, stripping wire, crimping connectors and then heat shrinking tubing over them.

Of course, all boat work takes longer than I think it will and making all the connections, securing the bundles, testing, labeling and documenting took about a week (mornings with a few longer sessions). All the wires are labeled and I created a back panel wiring schematic that I'll probably print and laminate to keep on the boat in case the shrink wrapped labels come off.

I still have work to do though. The navigation instrumentation isn't currently installed in the boat yet and that will be a while, so I've reserved most of the right terminal strip for those items and a few more for future needs. I also have to connect the new navigation lights, bilge blower, and shower fan to the newly installed wire before I'm fully done (as well as a few custom labels that I ordered for the distribution panel), but the bulk of this job is done.

Here are a few before and after photos:

FRONT PANEL BEFORE: