"KISS"

Well, well, when it rains it pours. I have always noticed that when bad things happen they seem to come in threes.  I have to admit that over the years I have become somewhat superstitious about this occurrence. That is why I was rather upset yesterday morning when I arose to discover the $45 LED light with a five year guarantee was very dim and flickering when I turned it on. The night before it had flickered a time or two while I was reading, so I naturally thought it, like most cheap LEDs was going on the blink. No pun intended. Just another high priced marine piece of junk, I thought. That was okay, because it brought the bad occurrences of late to three!

I decided to put the light off till later and make my morning coffee. At seven thirty the Sonrisa net comes on, so I turned on the SSB. The moderator was speaking, but the voice was scratchy. I hit the auto tuner button and it went through its normal blinking process and then settled on “through.” I tried it again with the same result, but I now could not hear anything, no voices. Great, the SSB is now dysfunctional, damn that’s four, which puts me on a new set of threes. This day is not looking good!

I thought, okay maybe the batteries are low on water, even though they shouldn’t be, as I had checked them two weeks before. They were down a lot, not to the plates, but very low. I have three different gauges/monitors for the batteries and checked them all. One was in the red on discharged. This was a first. My neighbor (CHUCK) came out and we discussed the problem and possible solutions. Out came the testers and sure enough I was down to ten volts on the house batteries. That explained the problem with the LED light and the SSB tuner. Ah! Ha!, back to two. A serious problem, but at least I’m ending a set of threes, not starting a new one. Look on the bright side, right?

I won’t bore you with the technical specifics on how we traced down the problem and its cause. I will say that the original cause was two days ago at 5:30 in the morning, when all of the lights in Santa Rosalia suddenly went out. I was up making coffee at the time and immediately went out and disconnected the 110v power supply to the boat, to protect the system from a power serge when it came back on. It turned out that a vehicle had hit a power pole, knocking out the power. I thought I was safe, until two days later when my batteries went dead and I discovered that the power can serge when it is knocked out. Obviously, this is what happened, as the battery charger side of my inverter no longer works. It is kaput!

Chuck and I did some more investigating and he said that my inverter does not go through my smart regulator system, therefore I can disconnect my inverter, wire the 110v supply direct and chuck the inverter into the sea. You see, I don’t really need an inverter. All it does is convert 12v to 110v from your house batteries when you are out to sea, or at anchor. I only have one item that requires 110v to function that I need in that situation. That is my computer and I can run it off of my generator, until I get a pistol type inverter made for computers that inverts 12v to 19v, which is required for my computer. The way my system is now is it converts 12v to 110v and then the computer power supply cord converts it “back” to 19v. This is an extremely inefficient system and an excessive waste of power. Also I do not need the charger side of the big inverter, as I have 360 WATS of solar panels that charge the house batteries with a Honda  2000 I generator for backup.

Wind Raven was previously owned by a very wealthy individual that installed the latest (at the time) and best systems money could buy. Unfortunately, that was mostly in the 90s and I have had to replace, or rebuild them. It has been a slow learning and very expensive process for me. The problem with fancy systems is the complication they cause in a basically simple system. It is easy to fall into the “I have to have that Syndrome.” Especially when you have the money to do so, as I once had. Oh! If I only knew then what I know now! I’ll tell you, I would have a much more simple system and my cruising kitty would have many, many more fun tickets in it! As of late, due to the lack of said “fun tickets” I am simplifying the systems. For instance; no inverterter needed, auto panel on water maker replaced with hand valves etc. etc. Yep, I am now practicing that old adage “KISS.”   KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID!