The last part of the AC rewiring project was to replace the panel.

The old panel looked like this

Of note, there is only one on/off breaker type, the rest are push button meaning that there was no way to turn anything except the water heater on or off. Also, there wasn’t a 120volt refrigerator, although that breaker was wired into… something. That combined with the connectors being Old Boat Wiring (uninsulated nylon crimps) meant it was time to replace the whole thing.

Especially since the old crimps weren’t the best.

I ended up replacing it with a Blue Seas panel that let me see both the Voltage and the Current and had a full contingent of on/off breaker switches.

Not much else to say really, except all the old AC wiring that wasn’t solid strand wiring had only two wires in it (no ground wire) which meant I had to rerun all THAT wire as well! Luckily it was just the battery charger and the hot water tank and both were fairly close by. The hot water tank had no ground terminal, so I drilled a hole in one of the ‘legs’ and attached the ground wire there.

Lastly, I just had to screw on the AC cover onto the back of the panel.

 

All in all the entire AC project took me a lot longer than I thought it would – I didn’t count on having to rerun every single bit of wire, but thems the breaks sometimes. It’s done now, and I figure the boat is 67% less likely to catch fire.

And it still took less time than Gudge’s – looking back reading old entries it took me almost a week just to change one outlet :-{

Having a far better idea of what I am doing this time around helps a lot!

 

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