My new 40.1 ran down the house bank

[jssailem]

Great share. You had a challenge with the bottle. You had Snow in Seattle. you had family. All the goodness.

There is a a secret about the launching bottle on a ship christening not shared.

They scratch / scar the bottle to assure the bottle breaks when swung against the ship.

Lovely name and a fun story. Congrats.

 

[hvac&r tech]

“ The auto side of the switch on the panel isn’t even connected to anything other than its own LED.”

This type of information if accurate is evidence of a willful sort of ambivalence to a technicians or hands on thinker boat owners sanity.If it’s true for my boat too, it led me to the incorrect assumption that my boat wouldn’t have an automatic bilge pump at the ready if I opened the house bank positive switch. I have stared at the bilge section with the pump and float about 10 times now, I had a habit of looking at bilges upon arrival and departure on my old boat, I know I can’t assume those floats always work, I’ve seen them fail. Ruined the cabin sole carpet on my old boat once. The bilges are bone dry every time I have checked on Marie Katherine. Still, given the choice of running down and cheesing $1,000 or so worth of batteries and driving 4 hours away from my boat with no automatic bilge pump at the ready, I would choose risking the batteries every time.

It cost Beneteau money too to make that bilge pump panel switch look and perform as if it was the way the automatic float bilge pump gets energized , if you’ve got a 3 position push button switch, with extra little lights at the bottom with symbols indicating auto and manual which I think it does, why not have the people designing, buying and installing that stuff talk to the people who are designing, buying and installing the wiring that powers the hot side of the float switch when battery isolator switch is open (and gives no indication that’s wired like that with a light or label)? Why have it just be a sort of rumor that it’s wired like that until one searches through the long book for the answer or wiring diagram that shows it? I have worked for manufacturers field service depts my whole shoreside career, and I’ve learned that unless someone makes a mistake, there’s nothing that cost the manufacturer time and material to put on their products that’s useless in actual operation, like you say the lit, auto pos bilge pump portion of the switch is. On large ships, if a shipyard put a switch on the bulkhead with lights and labels saying it’s the indication that a bilge pump will come on automatically when the ship takes on seawater, but it wasn’t wired to any float at all, I know some (now retired) chief and port engineers who likely wouldn’t bring their ship back to that yard- sounds almost criminal.

alas, now I’ll climb off the ledge.

 

[Davidasailor26]

“ The auto side of the switch on the panel isn’t even connected to anything other than its own LED.”

This type of information if accurate is evidence of a willful sort of ambivalence to a technicians or hands on thinker boat owners sanity.If it’s true for my boat too, it led me to the incorrect assumption that my boat wouldn’t have an automatic bilge pump at the ready if I opened the house bank positive switch. I have stared at the bilge section with the pump and float about 10 times now, I had a habit of looking at bilges upon arrival and departure on my old boat, I know I can’t assume those floats always work, I’ve seen them fail. Ruined the cabin sole carpet on my old boat once. The bilges are bone dry every time I have checked on Marie Katherine. Still, given the choice of running down and cheesing $1,000 or so worth of batteries and driving 4 hours away from my boat with no automatic bilge pump at the ready, I would choose risking the batteries every time.

It cost Beneteau money too to make that bilge pump panel switch look and perform as if it was the way the automatic float bilge pump gets energized , if you’ve got a 3 position push button switch, with extra little lights at the bottom with symbols indicating auto and manual which I think it does, why not have the people designing, buying and installing that stuff talk to the people who are designing, buying and installing the wiring that powers the hot side of the float switch when battery isolator switch is open (and gives no indication that’s wired like that with a light or label)? Why have it just be a sort of rumor that it’s wired like that until one searches through the long book for the answer or wiring diagram that shows it? I have worked for manufacturers field service depts my whole shoreside career, and I’ve learned that unless someone makes a mistake, there’s nothing that cost the manufacturer time and material to put on their products that’s useless in actual operation, like you say the lit, auto pos bilge pump portion of the switch is. On large ships, if a shipyard put a switch on the bulkhead with lights and labels saying it’s the indication that a bilge pump will come on automatically when the ship takes on seawater, but it wasn’t wired to any float at all, I know some (now retired) chief and port engineers who likely wouldn’t bring their ship back to that yard- sounds almost criminal.

alas, now I’ll climb off the ledge.

I agree. I assume Beneteau didn’t bother to re-spec the panel as they changed the wiring design over the years. The wiring diagrams in the owners manual are also speckled with inaccuracies as layouts change within production runs. On older boats the owners learn to trust nothing because of changes made by previous owners, but even on new boats it helps to verify assumptions along the way.

 

[jssailem]

On older boats the owners learn to trust nothing because of changes made by previous owners, but even on new boats it helps to verify assumptions along the way.

 

[smokey73]

@hvac&r tech you may be getting near the same soap box I find myself on and what prompted my "demand" to replace the batteries. When it comes to quality, we get what we expect unless we demand better. My concern still goes back to the Dealer somewhat. I am assuming the dealer is an authorized Beneteau dealer and thus has experience with potential "problem areas," one of which would seem to be bilge pump wiring. Is this systemic to all the same model boats (configuration control) or specific to your particular boat (quality control.) What always concerns me is what it implies about other sytems, which appear to be well founded based on what you found with the wiring of the shore/gen switch and the blown fuse.

Thus, the CRITICAL IMPORTANCE of the dealer Commissional process. They should have operated all systems, including the auto function of the bilge pump as well as the shore power/generator automatic and manual switches in all positions. They could easily dump a bucket of water in the bilge and see if the pump operates. Heck, when I had to rewire my bilge pump to install the digital bilge counter, I dumped a bucket of water into the bilge to make sure
1. The bilge pump comes on in auto
2. The counter registers the run
Not until then did I consider the new system modificaion "commissioned" and good to go.

Then doing your "troubleshooting" over the phone, especially when it appeared there was a wiring problem, not just an "operator" misunderstanding of how the system works,is unfathomable to my way of thinking.

Back off my soapbox.

 

[smokey73]

I'd call them back and get a copy of their "commissioning records" and request (firmly) that they reperform their New Boat Commissioning (at their expense) again at your location. Otherwise, you don't know what you really have as way of system operability.

But then again I am a hard@$$. (Retired Navy - my Master Chief COB (Chief of the Boat) would have been a little more colorful in his expression of his displeasure and requests to the Dealer. I wasn't the Master Chief, but worked closely with him on "course correction" whe needed. I was the good cop, he was the bad cop but I learned a lot from him - how to put "special phrases" together without extra words in between if you know what I mean.

 

[Stu Jackson]

@hvac&r tech - I'm very pleased that you've had positive resolution(s) to your issues via your dealer.

I've always wondered about bilge pump wiring that goes to a distribution panel that can be (and usually is) turned off for a load that is "always on." I could never understand the logic, or the wiring (see below). On my old boat, which I bought in 1998 when it was 12 years old, there was a bilge pump and float switch wired directly to the house bank (and properly fused). But there was no way to turn the pump on manually other than lifiting the float switch. So I added a manual/off/auto switch between the float switch and the pump. On newer versions of my same boat, the newer electrical panels had a bilge pump manual/off/auto switch on the panel, which my boat, of course, did not have. But since most folks I knew turned their main switch off when they left the boat, that switch was de-powered, but their pumps still worked. I never followed it up, but I assume that the only part of the circuit that was defeated was the manual "on" part when the power to the panel was shut down when the main switch was turned off. After all, it's only the switch leg, not the power, that is being turned off.