My biggest concern is the battery drain. Is this failure doing it? If it reoccurs will it kill my batteries? I like to leave my AC on when we are gone to keep air circulating and the dehumidifier going. i suppose I could turn off the charger when we leave
If you read any of my stuff dating back over the last 20 years or so you'll notice that I do not recommend leaving any AC or DC vessel loads on at the dock that rely on shore power. Marina wiring is historically unreliable when compared to land based systems. It is why the ABYC standards for AC boat wiring are so detailed and complex.
With high rates of outages, brown outs, reverse polarity, home made jury rig plugs & adapters made by boat owners who know anything about AC or marina wiring & voltage transients marina shore power really should not be relied on to "save your batteries"....
Today, with the new
ish NEC/NFPA land based regulations requiring ground fault protection for the marina service, outages are even more pronounced. This is only going to get worse, much worse, before it can get better. All it takes is one Daryl to plug in to the feed, with a non ABYC compliant shore power system, and the entire dock, finger pier or service is tripped for everyone on it. How many of those chargers will re-boot correctly after a fault/trip like this? How many of them are physically destroyed by these faults? Often times when the marina breaker is re-set every boat on that feed now draws full load power and trips it again, and again and again until the marina disconnects each boat and plugs them back in in a staggered fashion. If the guilty boat that caused the fault is still plugged in, the trips may occur dozens of times before the marina figures out which boat is causing the issue. None of this is good for any AC charge equipment.
Most invert chargers or smart battery chargers will simply not reboot if the battery voltage is too low. This is to prevent charging into an internally shorted/failed battery. If the outage is long enough, and you have on-board DC loads sucking at the battery, it can spell disaster for the bank. I replace thousands of dollars in destroyed batteries each year because an owner just wants a "
cold beer" or fans on or lights on etc... I know many folks ignore my cautions, due to the "
it won't happen to me" syndrome, until of course, it does.
There are really only a few solutions to marina power faults and those are:
*Don't plug in (safest and no risk of galvanically connecting your vessel to others in the marina)
*Plug in but install a low voltage disconnect that can be set to open at 12.1V or higher.
*Plug in but do not leave any DC loads on nor AC loads on especially if you have an automatic transferring inverter/charger..
*Add solar and a LVD.
