Professionals!

Today we called in the professionals....sometimes it's necessary!  On two fronts, first and rather mundanely we had to take Stella to the vet to get dewormed in preparation for our Glasgow Christmas.  Chuck never made it to the UK, but it seems Stella is going to.  Fingers crossed!

The other professional was an electrician.  We have had the absolute worst luck with batteries.  The boat came with two batteries that were rather old, but functioning.  One day in Denmark, the boat stank like rotten eggs.  Now, the man has many strong suits, but his sense of smell is not one of them.  He isn't sure he believes this though and so tends to underrate his family's complaints about stinks.  (indeed we had a gas leak in the house that took some time to convince him was there!!!)  Anyway, eventually the smell was so strong that I started searching for it.

I'll say this now.  If you smell rotten eggs on a boat, and there aren't any smashed rotten eggs? Check your batteries as fast as you possibly can.  They may be boiling over!!! And they can explode.  So that was fun.  The next day an absolutely gigantic viking of a man came over and sold us two new very lovely batteries!  Wonderful!!!

Later, when we got to where we stopped over the winter, we plugged in, but didn't hear the hum from the battery charger turning on.  We commented on this, but got on with our lives.  Mistake number 2.  If you notice something odd, go and investigate it right away!  It wasn't working, and we ran our batteries right down to 0.  (well layman 0, battery numbers are somewhat less intuitive).

Blessedly the damn things took a charge again, and hung in there.  We took the charger off, took it to the boat repair guy who told us it was both ancient and dead and bought a new one.  (oof)  Installed it and everyone was happy!  The battery charger is only used when we are hooked up to shore power, otherwise the batteries charge off the engine, which works fine when we're cruising.  It's only when we get to shore or a marina that we need to use it, and even then our electrical consumption is so low that we don't draw very much.

Fast forward to this fall, we get back to the boat, Bart the boat yard guy has been plugging the boat in dutifully, but....the batteries are dead.  Ho hum.  Brand new charger is dead again, and we have to get another new battery.  3 batteries, 2 chargers, 1 year.  Not a good average.

As the charger was still under warranty, it got sent off to get fixed, and we waited and waited and waited!  Finally this week it reappeared.  I had gone over to ask about it, planning to ask for the phone number of the shop so I could play the bad cop and start to get a little uppity about the piece.  Don't know if it's related, but it showed up 2 days later!!!  While I was talking to Bart the lovely boat yard guy, I asked if he thought maybe there was something wrong with the electrical installation, as much of the work had been done by the previous owners.  And some of it is a little basic. 

We went round and round that, basically thinking that maybe, yes, so an electrician came by today!  Good news, the installation is basically fine.  A little messy, but no problems.  Bad news, the problem is condensation!  (See the previous post about mildew.)  It is basically raining in the cockpit lockers and enough water is getting on this piece of MARINE electrics that it is messing it up.  Ho hum.

So, we are now madly investigating insulation and ventilation schemes, and the man is building an eave for it.  I think we should hang a neoprene shower curtain off it too, but we'll see.  We'll be off the boat for 10 days, back for a week then off again for 2 months, so things should dry out a bit.  The biggest issue with the condensation is the combination of the heat we add to the boat + the moisture we give off - humans give off about 2 liters a day each plus cooking and the dog...that's a lot of water!!!!

Get out your drills and I'll be phoning some boat insulation sales people tomorrow.  The old charts wrapped in garbage bags we're using in our clothing lockers are probably not ideal throughout the boat.