Electrical panel redo

[dbostrom]

As part of Project Marine Elegance I opened up the nav desk electrical panel on Kallisto to see about adding a breaker for the new loo.

Uh-oh. I trusted the surveyor on this one (young boat!) and it was a complete miss. Nothing that can't be fixed, but still a surprise.

The panels on Jeanneau boats are probably the single most unsatisfying aspect of these boats, for an electrical geek in any case. When we purchased ours, replacing the panel was on the billet from the start but I thought I'd do it next winter. No way, not now. 

For one thing, I'd never quite grokked to the fact that these panels use fuses instead of breakers. As well, there's so much stuff sharing so few panel switches that isolating a fault without losing other chunks of function is impossible, completely so once a normal suite of electronics is added to the mix. Develop a short in the autopilot, lose the plotter etc. 

Beyond that, our previous owner is a fantastic sailor but wasn't interested in electronics and electrical matters. He consigned care and feeding of electrical stuff to a "maintenance professional," resulting in this rat's nest building up in the four short years since the boat was commissioned:



Scorches the eyes. Look at the waxy buildup on grounds, the tray cover left off because it won't fit due to sloppy routing, etc. 

So panel replacement is getting bumped up to this year. This boat travels up to the Broughton group and other points way north each year, fairly far from immediate assistance; it's just not right letting folks go to such places and depend on such a mess, and such a perilous stacking of circuits on too few interrupters.

If anybody else has done a panel redo on a later Jeanneau and has tips to offer let me know! I'll be installing a Blue Sea 24 position DC panel, much smaller AC panel (disconnect + 3 breakers) and probably just sawing off and dressing the meter end of the Scheiber panel so as not have to get into the whole tank sensor issue this year. 

[Don Reaves]

I'll have to agree with you that the electrical panel's installation is the one thing I'm not happy about in my SO35. But it uses breakers and has basically one circuit per breaker, so at least that's OK.

My problem is the rats nest of wires, completely disorganized, in the space. It's difficult just to open the panel without stretching the wires, which is not supposed to happen.

[Damir]

Your electric installation Dbostrom looks great, on my Sunshine 38 is terrible. From the former owners as someone something installed or taking off wires are there too long, two fuses are bridged, nothing is cleaned so that the spring I have to get her out of the water and put everything in order before I go to sea. People have used as a house by the sea for a long time, they have maintained a good engine has 500 hours, the boat is in good condition, the sails also good, price was very small so we bought it in half an hour beyond belief. As I am an electrician for ships for me is  the least problem for now everything works fine. After a little fixing up when I have time ship is about 200 miles from my house in the Yachting port. Normal Sundays I go there but now I have the pressure of the job so I'll go there after the new year.

Damir

[dbostrom]

Thanks damir. It's amazing how electrical panels go this way; a sort of entropy-- one thing after the other installed in haste. 

It's difficult just to open the panel without stretching the wires, which is not supposed to happen.

No kidding. My fingers are just itching to get into the space. With just a few hours' work that problem can be corrected by doing a nice bundle with a generous loop to the actual panel itself.  Happily it turns out the Blue Sea panel is a vertical fit into the original panel space, so the hole only needs to be lengthened a bit. That of course means the inverter display needs to be bounced elsewhere. Amazing ripple effects. 

The only tough part about this is getting it done without a lot of delay once the job starts; I don't want to leave the boat in the water unattended without bilge pumps operational and for that matter no built-in lighting etc. Not hard to do temporary circuits but too many of those and one is losing effort from the main point. If I get all my measurements down correctly and have all parts in hand I'm figuring two days, with one night on a dark, cold, dead boat. 

[Trevor]

Hello dbostrom,

It is a shame that the electrical circuits are not treated with more respect when installed. I think it is because people want to the see the new gadget work and feel the satisfaction of that and because it can be done by simply throwing some wires in, that is what happens.

I like things well laid out because it makes life easier when you have to fix stuff later on.

I must confess I haven't heard of anyone actually simply replacing the entire distribution panel before. I would be ok to do it electrically but would be reluctant because it would not feel like the original Jeanneau fit out and I think that may impact the resale value of the boat and I do like the look of the factory panel.

I know the metering is not the best; inaccurate fuel gauge, inaccurate water gauges, battery alarms that go off when using the anchor winch, and as you say, not much segregation between devices like navigation equipment and autopilot for instance. I haven't considered replacing the entire panel however and you do give me reason to pause and contemplate that.

Much of the clutter behind your panel is simply carelessness. The duct cover on the right with the mains voltage sticker should be on the left for instance. Small things but not hard to get right.

I do like the way Jeanneau include some optional extra items already in the wiring harness. I know this is to make manufacturing easier but it works in our favour. I do like the resettable breakers instead of simple blade fuses which must cost them slightly more but they do install them anyway. I like the idea of the switchable meter on the Jeanneau panel but for me the battery alarms could use a time delay to allow for low terminal voltage when using the anchor winch etc. My pet dislike of the Jeanneau wring is that they do not ( or did not on my boat) use tinned copper wire. I realise this is a production boat and cost is important but I think using untinned copper wire is cutting too much.

I assume you will keep the actual distribution panel holding the breakers (and fuses I can see on your panel) and wire your new switch panel to it.

I am interested in how your panel replacement project goes. I know sometimes it is difficult to do, but a few photos and a step by step guide may be a great addition to the hint and tips section for any owners who would like to follow your lead in the future. I am keen to know how you handle tank level monitoring and current monitoring etc.

Good luck with this interesting project.

Regards.
Trevor

[Damir]

Hello Trevor

Most people are not electrician and there is a problem and neither want to see. All added to an existing installation of new devices that were not calculated in the consumption of electricity and at the end of the feeder cable too small for the electricity that they draw. There is a possibility of fire but most often is that when some of the largest consumers engage voltage drops and then got a surprise that on account of lower voltage withdraws more electricity and burn. Normally you must increase the surface area of the wires that feed the fuses panel and calculate consumption of all devices and that few know and not working properly. Wee always have a problem  when you do not need. So the windshield wipers on the car stop working when it rains, never in the beautiful weather.

regardsn
Damir

[vasko]

Dec 28, 2014 18:24:39 GMT dbostrom said:

As part of Project Marine Elegance I opened up the nav desk electrical panel on Kallisto to see about adding a breaker for the new loo.

Uh-oh. I trusted the surveyor on this one (young boat!) and it was a complete miss. Nothing that can't be fixed, but still a surprise.

The panels on Jeanneau boats are probably the single most unsatisfying aspect of these boats, for an electrical geek in any case. When we purchased ours, replacing the panel was on the billet from the start but I thought I'd do it next winter. No way, not now. 

For one thing, I'd never quite grokked to the fact that these panels use fuses instead of breakers. As well, there's so much stuff sharing so few panel switches that isolating a fault without losing other chunks of function is impossible, completely so once a normal suite of electronics is added to the mix. Develop a short in the autopilot, lose the plotter etc. 

Beyond that, our previous owner is a fantastic sailor but wasn't interested in electronics and electrical matters. He consigned care and feeding of electrical stuff to a "maintenance professional," resulting in this rat's nest building up in the four short years since the boat was commissioned:



Scorches the eyes. Look at the waxy buildup on grounds, the tray cover left off because it won't fit due to sloppy routing, etc. 

So panel replacement is getting bumped up to this year. This boat travels up to the Broughton group and other points way north each year, fairly far from immediate assistance; it's just not right letting folks go to such places and depend on such a mess, and such a perilous stacking of circuits on too few interrupters.

If anybody else has done a panel redo on a later Jeanneau and has tips to offer let me know! I'll be installing a Blue Sea 24 position DC panel, much smaller AC panel (disconnect + 3 breakers) and probably just sawing off and dressing the meter end of the Scheiber panel so as not have to get into the whole tank sensor issue this year. 

Lucky you! you have so much space and access .... in my case it looks like a snake nest where it is very difficult to put my hand at all...

[dbostrom]

Trevor, I'll take lots of pictures. I'm not sure I'd want to own a boat without living in the era of digital cameras; at 90 miles away and 56 years old, neither the distance to the boat nor my memory is conducive to planning without pictures. Meanwhile, feeding this board with more information is a very efficient use of time; the more people can lean on one another to avoid duplicated effort the better. 

Actually I'll be removing the distribution/fan-out blocks as well and replacing them with conventional busbars and barrier strips. In particular, the grounding provisions on the factory arrangement are pretty nasty; you can see the problem with grounding in the upper right portion of the picture, just below the spare fuses container. 

I agree some folks won't like the nonfactory outcome of this but in the case of the electrical panel arrangement it's a pretty hard limit to the versatility and robustness of the boat. I think the bean counters won a battle too many, or Scheiber's executives take Jeanneau honchos out for many rounds of golf, or something like that. So it's a big upheaval but best for the boat and our chartering customers, both of whom routinely go way north and far from help.

[In fairness to Jeanneau, I think it's also true that two masters are served by these designs, one of them being the charter trade for very casual sailors who would like to spend a week on a sailboat without being confronted by an overly-complicated control system. It's a matter of delicacy figuring out what will work in the charter trade and what won't. In our case our customers are a bit more savvy than average. From a pure engineering perspective this boat would ideally have something like 32 breakers but that's too extreme.]

Interestingly, similarly to pouring cooking oil down the toilet the benefits of tin are a bit overestimated. Long term, tin appears to be of surprisingly little help though it might certainly be useful in the case of a temporary dunking and all-in-all is a sound choice. See this article: www.practical-sailor.com/issues/36_12/features/Electrical-Wire-Endurance-Test_5989-1.html with some surprising results. Point is, there's little reason to worry over the non-tinned wiring on our boats, unless we plan on keeping them very, very wet inside. Nicer if it were tin but nothing to lose sleep over.

...in my case it looks like a snake nest where it is very difficult to put my hand at all... 

You can see them breeding in my panel! Hit 'em early and hard, before the population explosion. 

[dbostrom]

Step one (aside from dropping 1.5 boat bucks on electrical gear) accomplished.

The boat is 90 miles from home. The existing electrical panel doors/control mounts need their cutouts modified. Doing this carefully means removing the doors and bringing them home into controlled conditions.  Meanwhile the marina folks are really good about looking after boats for remote owners, including checking battery status/bilge operation, moving boats in case of crisis etc. As well, certain things need to stay powered up because the boat is in the water. So, leaving the electrical controls exploded all over the nav station was not an option.  I made some temporary door/mounts to hold the existing complement of electrical controls, good enough so that a passing glance doesn't lead to "why is the nav station made of cardboard?"   

Now I can take as much time as necessary to do careful layout and cutting, not on a dock. The retrofitted doors will go back up with the new components in place, terminal blocks etc. already attached and ready to be connected to the boat.

Wire protection for the smaller bits of kit on the boat (wind instruments etc.) means a fork in the road: either a breaker has to be provided sized for whatever ends up leading into a black box (often 18 gauge), or a larger breaker can protect a group of components each fused from a block fed by the larger breaker. Providing a breaker for every device would mean panel with something like 36 breakers on it, so smaller electronics will be fed by a handful of breakers logically subdivided. This is similar to what Jeanneau does, except they go too far with the concept (I do wonder if Jeanneau's small boat heritage has something to do with the struggle they appear to be having with scaling their electrical gear). 

One thing that Jeanneau does right: documentation of the wiring. Wires are actually properly physically tagged and correspondingly identified in the docs, except where local technicians who don't read manuals have removed the tags. 

Blows my mind that fuses are behind what is basically cabin furniture needing to be unscrewed for access. The whole factory arrangement is just not very well thought out. 

[dbostrom]

Getting there. 

Panel pretty much ready to be married to the boat. The gap at the end will be filled by the sliced-off gauge portion of the original Scheiber combination affair.

This is a Blue Seas 24 circuit DC board along with a main+3 circuit Blue Seas AC board. The DC portion is split into essential and nonessential groups (cut-out of bus bar), with the nonessential stuff to be fed by a Blue Seas low voltage disconnect. After subdividing some things that were over-crammed as groups in the manufactured version there are 2 spare circuits per group (2 panel positions taken by auto-manual bilge switching). All wiring with the exception of panel lighting is #10 as there's little point in trying to predict future changes and I'd like the board to be pretty much invisible in terms of voltage drop.

Tagged end of wires will go to barrier strips or fused distribution blocks as necessary, where original wiring will join up with new wire protection. The feeds from the boat to the bus bars will be handled separately from the main bundle as the bundle is already fairly stiff and as well mixing radically different gauges in a single bundle is problematic. 

I'm also planning on paralleling another #6 for ground and positive from the battery bank; the conductors as supplied are scanty but at the same time it seems a shame to simply rip out and replace what's already there. 

One thing Blue Seas doesn't really have down too well is the panel lighting arrangement; each stack of breakers has its own little regulator board and collection of leads for "on" indicators, meaning each stack's lighting needs to be interconnected with other stacks and thus leading to a bit of furry look. Whatever-- it'll all be nice and glowy when installed and powered up. 

The panel is sitting in a little rack so as to make the whole thing easier to deal with.

[rene460]

Hi dbostrom,

A beautiful job which clearly tells a story of your other career.  Looking forward to the full hints and tips article.  Your obvious knowledge of layout and all the necessary bits to make it work, is the area that lets most of us down.  The glamour bits on the other side are the easy part.  I like your analogy with entropy.  The initial installation on our 2004 SO30i was impressive compared with some boats I have seen, but as you say not so good for later adding the inevitable complexity, and some of those fuses are hard to find.

rene460

[Trevor]

Nice work dbostrom. I am so keen to see the finished product. Looks really great from behind.

Trevor

[dbostrom]

This is one of those projects that if fully imagined might never come to be, once all the details emerge like snowflakes in headlights. Ignorance is sometimes strength.  

Full documentation to follow but between grinding on the boat and everything else it'll be April before the report is in with supporting evidence. The boat has to leave the dock in exactly one week and it's still one toilet short of a full deck; I need to shift my focus of attention. Wire dressing is forestalled.

So no pictures of the back of the panel at this point because it's too ugly. Wires have to be cut to length* and layered in order to come together nicely and that's a perfect job for on a mooring buoy at Patos Island, equipped with ample wine and a bag of wire ties.   Cut first, layer last. Wires are the correct length but with something like 40+ circuits (counting by grounds) errors in initial layering are almost inevitable; count on tweaking layers before getting out the tie wraps.

Here's the front, 95% working. Some alarms and indicators (little Blue Seas panel) need to be hooked up and there are some other items such as a trim piece for the gap between the Scheiber and breaker panel coming in. Also custom breaker labels from Blue Seas arrived too late for this shot. More info later-- we're obligated to do a "shakedown cruise" for the charter firm-- that trip is beginning to look like a sea trials for a larger vessel with 20 yard workers aboard trying to make completion stay ahead of the test schedule.



*Although in this case I'm not cutting length off of factory wires-- "que sera, sera" on what happens out of sight down in the pocket behind the nav desk. Sssh!

[moonshadow]

I am trying to find ddirional vircuot breakers for my 2014 usa 12 volt jeanneau. They don’t seem to show up in catalogs and I am wondering if there is an easy source or if these are a French item.
I can send a photo but I haven’t figured out the way to post one here.

[dbostrom]

Jun 6, 2018 21:13:44 GMT moonshadow said:

I am trying to find ddirional vircuot breakers for my 2014 usa 12 volt jeanneau. They don’t seem to show up in catalogs and I am wondering if there is an easy source or if these are a French item.
I can send a photo but I haven’t figured out the way to post one here.

Somewhere in my pile of boat surplus I have the breakers from our 2010, removed as part of the job above. If you send me an email w/a photo I can compare. bostrom.doug(AT)gmail.com. Not sure where you are but flat rate US postage will take one anywhere in the world for a few dollars. 

[ah, you're in the US. So mebbe $2. Breaker is free, if it fits.]

[MalcolmP]

Jun 6, 2018 21:13:44 GMT moonshadow said:

I can send a photo but I haven’t figured out the way to post one here.

jeanneau.proboards.com/thread/6004/easier-photo-upload-threads

Fairly straightforward, easier than doing wiring 😁

[moonshadow]

Thanks Malcolm. I will give that a try.