2120 - "Cat's Cradle"- Off Season Projects

Brought my boat home early this year due to a surgery I had so I'm getting an early start to my spring projects. The list is long this year. Here is what I'm hoping to get done.
1. Clean the carpet liner in cabin
2. Repair several areas with chips/scratches in hull gel coat
3. Repair gel coat surface cracks around motor notch on transum
4. Repair surface cracks in deck and redo deck non skid
5. Compound and wax entire boat
6. Redo bottom pain and add a boot stripe
7. Add underwater lights to transum
8. Add hard wired battery charger (this was carry over from last years list)
9. Add 200AH battery to bilge and relocate all start battery connections to port jump seat eliminating battery from starboard jump seat. (Correcting for added weight at helm on AC unit and prep for adding inverter to port jump seat to run AC while under power.)
10. Adding bracket mounted stereo speakers under the gunwales in the deck.

I'm sure that I have a few more but that's the bulk of it.

So far, I've checked off number 1. There has been much discussion on here as to the best way to clean the carpet liner, so here is what I used. I tried Folex, which my wife has used for years in the house on carpets, but I was not happy with how it worked on the mold. I ended up going with an old stand by of bleach and water mixed in a pump sprayer. I also used Oxi Clean on some areas with rust stains and it seemed to finish what the bleach and water didn't quite do. I wrapped my dash with a small tarp and just used a hose to rinse out the carpet liner from top to bottom. As we are having multiple days of decent weather here I'm able to just leave the boat open to air dry. I've wanted to do this sense I bought my boat 3+ years ago but never got to it. My carpet liner had many stains and rust stains along with mold. It looked terrible. Now it looks almost as good as a new one. Number 1. check!

Looks great

Thanks a Mike. Much still to do. Did the anchor locker yesterday using the same method. Pretty sure it has never been cleaned. Plan on cleaning every inch of it from front to back before returning it to the coast. Hoping now that it is stored in Beaufort in a fully inclosed boat barn where I can keep the port windows etc open, it will stay in good shape?
An additional item, I have a rupture in the fuel vent hose up where it attaches to the vent. Now I'm going to pull the bench seat out so I can replace that and the fuel fill hose while I'm at it. Pulling the bench seat will also allow me better access to clean that area where the hoses are and by the step up. Due to mounting that large battery in the bilge it looks like I'm going to move my fuel filter as well so in the theme of replacing fuel hoses I'm going to go ahead and replace all the fuel lines leading to the engine from the tank. The boat is 10 years old now and leaking fuel is something I'm not willing to take any chances on. The list grows. :lol:

Wow! Looks great!

When we got our 2520XL it had been badly neglected. We were pretty certain that we would have to have the "monkey fur" stripped off and replaced. On advice from this list, we decided to try the Oxi-Clean route. We filled a pump-up,garden sprayer with Oxy and water and saturated the overhead and walls. Holy Crap! It looked like a crime scene. The walls ran reddish brown with rust and mildew. It looked like there had been a knife fight! After thirty minutes we turned the water hose on it, with a pressure nozzle. We were shocked at how well it cleaned up. A shop-vac sucked up most of the water and a few days of sunshine and breeze finished the job. It wasn't perfect, but it was a huge improvement.

Cool Change is snug in the storage barn for the winter but we will likely repeat the treatment again in the spring.

Thanks Randy. It really is an eye opener on how much nasty stuff comes out of that liner when you clean it. If time and money were not a factor, I would strip that crap out and replaces it with finished gel coat, vinyl or a other non fabric option. I wish Parker would step up their game with respect to this finish.

Hi Shawnee!
I was thinking about using vinyl or Awl-Grip. But the more I think about it the more I think it's a bad idea. I'm betting that the carpet stuff really attenuates the sound. I was pretty surprised how much motor noise we have in the pilothouse. I can only imagine how bad it would be with all those hard surfaces for the sound to bounce around. Think I'll stay with the "monkey fur".

That is true Randy. The only good thing about the carpet is that it absorbes the noise a bunch. The only other option I think would still be bette would be vinyl. At least the insulation would be behind the vinyl and it would achieve the same results and you could wipe it down. I'll be living with the carpet though.

After being out of action for projects due to work, the holidays, surgery and lastly the weather, I'm hoping to get some of them done in the next few weeks. I got a few items in today that I'm looking forward to installing/using. Pics are the ProNautic 12.20P Digital battery charger and the Lumitec SeaBlaze Mini (blue) underwater lights. I'll post pics of the installs as I go.

I only had a few hours today to work on the boat so I decided to install a pair of Ploy Planer box speakers that I already had from when I change them out in the cabin. I mounted them under the gunwal in the deck. I think it's a good spot to mount box speakers as you can't see them, don't have to cut any fiberglass and other than the port side the wire run issue isn't to bad. Hope to start on the battery charger and underwater lights this week weather permitting?

Trying to figure out the ground wires at my start battery as I'm going to order some wire for my battery charger instal. I need some help from our electrical experts. See pic of start battery, there are 3 large grounds. One appears to be from the house battery, one goes to the switch. It's the 3rd I need clarification on. Does the 3rd go to the engine and then one is going from the engine to the neg bus under the dash? This is my assumption? If this is the case, then I will need to run the charger neg and the green wire for the case ground all the way to the neg bus under the dash? I have a neg bus in the bilge with a few small gauge wires attached but I haven't traced what they are. I think one of them is running to the neg at my start to ground that bus? Either way, I feel sure that I shouldn't ground to this bus for the charger? Any clarification would be great. Thanks

Be VERY careful ! A GND cable does NOT go to the master switch.

That Black cable you see at the Master switch is the POS cable that goes to your motors starter solinode.

What I see. Bare Copper Ends.... [asking for corrosion] I see it All the time.....Dropping the dollar to pick up the nickle.

Only use Tinned Copper Ends.

Wing Nuts get rid of them...replace with stainless lock nuts, but be sure to add some dialectric grease
to the studs...... I have had the nuts gaul twice in the past.

Why No wing nuts?

Because they come loose. We all know never to turn the Master switch to OFF with the notor running..... Right?

Well if the cable looses connection with the motor running it's the same thing.....It can blow your Alt out.



I can't tell what that 3rd Battery cable is on your GND? GND from Outboard - GND to connect to other Batteries GND - 10ga Black feeds that GND buss with the Yellow Automotive ends on the wires. The Green is a Bonding GND

Thanks for the feedback Wart. I had thought about asking about using nylon locking nuts on the battery connections so that's good to know and I will put it all back together that way. I'm hoping to knock off work early this afternoon while I have daylight and decent weather and remove both batteries and clean out the jump seats. I'll put my hands on the cables then and trace where each goes. As to the copper lug connections, I'm assuming that's how it came from the factory as I've not changed anything back there yet. I did plan on ordering all of my wire with the marine grade tinned copper wire and connectors but thanks for that as well. Everything I wire will not have automotive ends on it and it will all be heat shrink only. I hear ya on that and I don't understand why they do this OE on a boat. I'll probably change out those old ones while I'm at it. I do plan to add that BEP cluster switch you told us about too.
So just to confirm, I should probably run my charger DC ground and the case bonding ground up to the dash where my main Neg bus is located?

I'll post confirmation of where those 3 neg battery cables are going for sure tonight after I verify better.
Thanks!

Ok Wart. I confirmed that there is a harness with 2 black cables together that split a few feet before the end. One is the black you see at the bat switch and the other is one of the grounds at the battery. The other 2 grounds: one is from the house battery on the port side and the other is running up towards the dash and I'm assuming to the negative bus there.

Based on this, I will run a black 8 AWG battery charger DC neg to to neg bus bar at the dash and I will also run a green 10 AWG to that bus as well. If you think otherwise please let me know.

FYI - there were nuts under those wing nuts but not nylon.

I hear ya on that and I don't understand why they do this OE on a boat.

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Bean Counters !

Where are you mounting the charger?

That carpet turned out great.
I'll be doing the Oxy-Clean and water wash on mine this coming spring.

I did not have the room to put buss bars in my transom area to tame my battery wiring, so I used this solution.
Got the idea from another member here.

Thanks Kevin and Wart.
Wart - I'll be mounting the charger in the bilge. It will be on the port - side bulkhead of the bilge. Up and the the right of that strainer you see in the pic. Opposite of that negative bus bar in the bilge also shown in pic.

I'm going to show my lack of full understanding on grounding and bonding but was wondering why I can't just run a heavier grounding cable from the start battery to that bus in my bilge and then run the charger neg and case ground to that bus instead of all the way to the dash? Can you walk me through neg/ground 101 and explain where I'm off in this concept?

Thanks.

shawnee83":15jiwpp1 said:

...... why I can't just run a heavier grounding cable from the start battery to that bus in my bilge and then run the charger neg and case ground to that bus instead of all the way to the dash? .......

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I would not run the charger grounds all the way to the helm buss. I see no advantage in this. Heavy charge current would therefore have to loop all the way to the helm ground buss via your new wire, & back to the batteries via your original ground wire. Why pass that potential of 60 amps through a round trip of 40 feet of wire, when it's only purpose is to charge your batteries only inches away. It appears you have a 60 amp charger, and that it is connected to both batteries (positive) without any isolation. I'm assuming the battery isolation occurs inside the charger. It would be tempting to run 2 identical ground wires from a single point at the charger, to a ring terminal on each battery negative. That ground buss in your boat's wiring image doesn't show any heavy duty battery connections that would support 60 amps (8 ga. wire in free air, or 6 ga. max.). So if you have to feed a buss with a heavy wire anyway, why not just have that heavy wire go directly from the charger to the battery negative posts. It should suffice to run a conveniently thinner 30 amp wire (10 ga.) to each battery negative, but I don't know if each battery charger output has the ability to supply 60 amps for when a single battery needs all 60 amps. You very well may have a charger that has the capacity to supply 30 amps max to each battery, 60 amps total, in which case I would run 2 symetrical ground wires to a splice-point at the charger. No need for a buss, those are for the loads, just a splice-point for 3 charger ground wires, one charger negative connecting 2 battery-negatives. The shorter the better. No need to run grounds 40 feet round trip to helm and back. The helm buss is just for the distribution of loads (appliances).

Those heavy battery lugs have the capacity of passing cranking currents (hundreds of amps). You can easily pass 30 charging amps through a thinner conventional ring terminal. Keep in mind that your batteries will only require/draw the full 30 amps for a brief amount of time, before tapering off to a more moderate amperage. Your charger wiring and connectors will not be at full capacity at all times. The description below describes why.

If you have a 3-stage charger, the initial "bulk charge" stage will maintain a fixed high-current, allowing the voltage to increase until a specific voltage is achieved. This is called "constant current mode". Your charger should then switch to "constant voltage mode", where the voltage is steady but the amperage is allowed to diminish as the charge progresses. Then the 3rd and final "float" stage supplies an extremely small maintaining current. One word of caution... these charge modes will switch at different voltages based on the battery chemistry you are using (agm, lead-acid, gell-cell, etc.), so these chargers usually can be configured for the type of battery being charged. It is important to set up your battery type.

Does the manual specify if each battery has the ability to be charges at 60 amps? Or 2 outputs of 30 amps each? This will have a bearing on wiring and ring terminal size.

Thanks for the reply and information Jim. Couple of thoughts, that start battery already has 3 large ground lugs and the 2 smaller ones. Of the 2 small ones, there is a 10 AWG black grounding that bus in the bilge and the other is the green. I've not traced the green yet, but I think it may be going to the sending unit at the tank? You can see all of these in the pic. Anyway, that stud is getting full at the start battery already and if I add 2 more, getting my nylon lock nut on it will be close and a lot of layers of lugs/ring terminals. That said, you seem to have confirmed that I can use that bus in the bilge if I just change out that 10 AWG ground for a heavier ground? Then I can also just move that green down to the bilge bus as it's running by it already anyway. Also, that bus in the bilge has 5/8 studs like the battery on both ends but you can't see them with the cover on it as shown in the pic. At least that what I think I remember seeing when I looked, need to confirm that when I get back home. My thought was to ground that bilge bus with a 6 AWG on the 5/8 stud and use an 8 AWG for the charger common neg and a 10 AWG green for the charger case ground all also on the bus studs? These wire sizes should all be oversized by 1 size according to the reference chart on the charger manual. I feel better about doing this with DC power? Also, sorry for the confusion on the charger but it's actually a 20 amp. The pic of my actual charger shows that but the wiring diagram from the manual that I screen shot shows the 60 amp. The reason I chose this charger after much research was a combo of size(for fitting), ratings and features. It's fully digital and programmable per bank. It will/can put all 20A to one battery or devide the current depending on needs. In the summer I replaced my start battery with an Optima D34M AGM. My plan as part of this project is to add a Vmaxtanks MR197 200AH AGM in the bilge next to the charger. I'm thus removing my current house bat from the port jump seat. I'm doing all of this in preperation for adding an inverter to run my AC/Heat while under way. It will mount in the port jump seat compartment. I should be able to run AC about 4 hrs with this set up?

That charger has a total of 60amps.... It's the way they write it on chargers... It has 2 circuits. So 60 devided by 2 = 30amps per branch. If it was a 3 bank it would be 20amp per bank.

That's a pretty hot charger.

But I agree with Jersey Mike.