Gfi

rasbury

So...here is my set up: pulled and ordered a new starter and pulled the boat home. I turn the power on and I got zip which is no surprise..another thread...so, no worries I'll put it on the charger. I recall when I pulled the motor and had no batteries in the boat everything would pretty much work on shore power. So hooked it up..turned on the panel at the battery switch. Turned on the shore power, got the light, turned on the battery charger (one battery is in the boat, which I used to close the hatch, no shore power) and got nothing at the helm or cabin lights. The Guage was reading the shore power panel....so for some dumb reason I thought I should trip the gfi. Now nothing works and the gfi does not seem to be clicking it back on? I pulled the panel to do an easy swap on a gfi plug- have to take the whole panel apart to get at it...I have light on my shore power plug. On the 270 it's the only gfi , not one at the head or out by the sink, TV plug in- just the one outlet on the panel. Please just don't say test it for power, you have to explain it to a 5 year old...and is this a "marine" 12v gfi plug? I assume not...

rasbury

Update sort of I did get the GFI pulled out tested across the terminals flicker the on/off back and forth and it was dead for continuity. So that answers that question but does that shut down power to the whole boat or just the 120 volt side?

rasbury

Well, number one it did fix the problem. 2nd, the way  my neighbor said to check it, term to term on the screws for continuity is not right. New one would not either. It was the original one and would not reset. So, next week the starter.

davidbrooks

I had GFI's go out multiple times.  They can be very frustrating.  Basically when it trips it will shut off power to all of the other outlets on that circuit.  So that GFI and everything downstream.  Not the whole boat though.  Only the outlets.  On by 342 the wiring went from the breaker box to the GFI, then around the aft bunk to the first outlet by the table, to the second outlet and then topside to the outlet by the topside refrigerator. It was almost not worth it to troubleshoot it.  I would simply pull the outlet out and see if it had power coming from the breaker box.  If it did.  Replace it.

rasbury

@davidbrooks I agree that the gfi should only affect the 120v but seems like something of a tie in somewhere else- and me and electrical are barely on speaking terms. When I had the motor out I could run the hatch on shore power- no batteries in the boat so there has to be an inverter somewhere? With the bad gfi and one battery hooked up it would not run the hatch- when I replaced it the hatch now worked. No idea what the state of the battery is other than low...

davidbrooks

Yeah that doesn't makes sense to me at all. The hatch motor should only be on the DC side of things. Pulling a battery makes sense that it stops it from working. Replacing the GFI makes absolutely no sense to me. The only thing that I can think of is that your battery charger might be on the same circuit as the GFI.

Dream_Inn

Yes, David got it right.  The hatch worked because you had the battery charger on and it was using the 12V output from it.  And the bad GFI caused issues because the charger is on that same circuit for your boat.

rasbury

Interesting...but makes sense even to me!