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Rocker Switches not working on 2007 Captiva 226
CopperWires
Member Posts: 9 ✭
I recently purchased this boat and when I got it home and hooked up a battery, the rocker switches did not work. This includes the CD Player, Horn, Nav lights, Dock lights, Courtesy lights, Blower, Bilge pump, and accessories. The Captain's Call exhaust switch works as well as the ignition and all the gauges from what I can tell. The engine will turn over. I have found 5 fuses in the engine bay a 20, 40, 40, 15, and a 3 IIRC. They all look good. I have a total of 2 positive leads hooked to the wing nut + terminal and a large + lead on the post terminal. The rest of the leads seems to be all black or wrapped in wire loom and hooked to the - post and wing nut terminals. I'm struggling to find what I'm missing but with all these switches not working, I feel like it has to be something simple.
Has anyone else experienced this trouble before? And can anyone offer any advice? I really excited about having a boat again but this is starting to get frustrating. Thanks for any help in advance.
Comments
PC BYC, Holland, MI
in most cases, it is the hot wire that the switch bridges, but in some cases folks use the negative post to complete the circuit.
there could possibly be one single hot lead running to the switches for the devices- and an after switch wire from the switch to the devices themselves.. if you can determine which one is hot from the battery, and distinguish it from what is hot to the device- I rec you flip your multimeter over to continuity and touch the hot lead on the device itself and the same wire at the switch and hope for a beep....
I'm hoping someone didn't just flop a panel in there to look good for selling the floater, and left you a mess of wiring to figure out.
PC BYC, Holland, MI
I'm also aware that the two main power leads provide power to the engine and the smaller leads provide power to accessories. Other than a couple smaller gauge red wires the rest are in wire loom and aren't obviously positive leads without testing them. I was hoping someone might be able to point out something that is obviously hooked up incorrectly if I provide a picture. I just have to run by there this afternoon to get the picture. Thanks for all the helpo so far.
get yourself a stretch of 12ga wire.. say, 20' worth... put an inline fuse in either end of say, 20a.. tap into the incoming hot leads at the rocker panel, and then touch the other end directly to the battery.. see if your switches work.. if they do, you've got a break in continuity of that hot line..
if they don't, wire the hot lead in the loom back up as it was... tap the negative lead, instead.. touch the other end of the 20' stretch to the negative post on the battery.. if the rockers light up, you have a bad ground...
when you get your multimeter working again, use your 20" lead to test out continuity for both leads and their grounds...
that is pretty much all you can do to isolate issues.. what could have happened to your system is that someone touched the negative lead to a hot source inadvertently and sent charge to the switches, which weren't grounded at that point, and you could have lost every one of them... you can test this easily with your meter by closing the circuit on the rocker switch and testing for continuity across the connection posts... they should have that continuity while closed, and not when open.. they could have blown internally if charged up the ground line, which is one reason why I like to fuse even ground lines on a boat though folks look strangely at me when I suggest such a thing.
vasoline, in addition to other purposes I'm told it's handy for but never tried, will NOT allow corrosion to gather on electrical points... it lives in my toolbox for that reason alone, though my wife thinks that is hilarious and likely gives her a little pause whilst I'm in the yard or at the dock working on my boat.. :-D
While in the sand box, we would protect our pistol magazines from sand (sand will stop a follower on the magazines spring quick like) by shoving them in condoms.. also, a condom over the muzzle of a rifle would protect from sand infiltrating the chamber and jamming a cartridge- or worse, infiltrating the gas ports and disallowing auto feeding.. its not like you can buy those things easily in gulf Islamic countries.. so.. took them with us.. along with vasoline for electrical connections... We would always send the new guys in to buy them, and had him buy huge boxes and jars of both at the same time, before we left... I would love to hear the comments after we left, and what they thought we were doing whilst we were deployed.. :-)