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Adagio - It's the Little Things ( 5/18/2016 )



Having not been a lifelong sailor, I am often (very often) amazed by the solutions to seemingly difficult problems which come forth out of innovative necessity. I remember the day I innocently retrieved our anchor from the deep waters of Soper's Hole, Tortola only to find a second anchor tangled in ours. Now where did THAT come from??? It did explain why the windlass seemed to labor a lot, but I didn't have a clue how to separate them.
The owner of the other boat, obviously more seasoned than I, already had his engine started and was single-handing his larger boat to make sure that he didn't get set too far off. I lowered the chain back down to the bottom and ,moved forward a few yards, hoping that dragging them along would separate them, and it did. However, when I retrieved our anchor again it came up with his chain solidly snugged in our Rocna anchor's shapr spade and with the tension of the boats and anchors I didn't see how I could reach it to separate them. I briefly grabbed a boat hook until I actually thought about it and about that time the other sailor yelled calmly (if you can do that) "get a line on it!" Ummm, yep, why didn't I think of that??? Cleating a line over the chain and the letting mine down a little relieved enough tension to separate the two of us and we set our separate ways. Later, when I dinghied over to thank him, he said only "these things happen." and was very gracious about my inexperience.

Now, I said all that to say this ... Adagio is doing well as we make our way toward the Azores, but last night we had a seemingly difficult situation which ended up being pretty simple.
We typically run the generator for charging twice a day, and we do it on my watch. Our battery controller is a DCC4000 and has had it's share of 'finicky' moments as it tries to out-think the chargers. This time it went one up on me and decided not to play fair at all. I thought we might have a pretty serious, as in return to Bermuda, charging problem on our hands.

The generator usually pumps out 50 amps early, then 40 or so for a while and stays at 35 Amps for the remainder of bulk charging before going to float. I watch the bank voltage and ampere feed pretty religiously to make sure it is all going well. It also has a pretty presumptive reading of percent capacity and remaining amp hours .. it's more of a guideline, actually :)

After starting the Generator I clicked on the battery charger and ... 1 Amp was going to the batteries. This is to a bank of 8 group 29 deep cycle marine batteries that are fairly new. "Weird", says I. Looking at the voltage, it was good enough to be charging, but it didn't seem to be doing anything. So, I shut the charger off to try and re-cycle it. While the charger was off, I saw that the ~discharge~ was also showing one amp. This is really bad, as it means that the freezer and refrigerator and electronics aren't drawing what they should. "Problem??", says I ... and I was beginning to think so. I did not want to run out to sea having slowly but inexorably dying batteries on board.

I decided, after cycling the charger and resetting the controller, that the thing was just being untruthful to me and had chosen to not play well with others. I charged the batteries as long as we usually do and the battery bank voltage held well after shutdown. This morning the voltage was still good (as expected). I tried several more times to get the controller to speak honestly to me and finally decided I'd better get a flashlight to see if I could see anything amiss in the [parts of the system that were fairly easily accessible.

As I took my first look at the first component (the controller display) I wiggled the connector and it sprang back to life. So, cleaning and re-seating and we are as good as new (well, as good as 1998).

I don't like having to worry and puzzle and stress about failures, but the moral is that it was indeed a very small and simple problem that was easily corrected. As complex as some of these systems seem to be, they are not really magic and there are a few common and basic threads that hold everything together. In this case it was connectivity. I didn't actually make any kind of 'discovery', I just started poking around in as near to a logical order as I could think of (and yes, I broke out the manuals :)

What seemed like a potential show-stopper ended up being a 'wiggle-fix" and boy am IO glad for that.

Until next time!!

Gary
Adagio

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