Short Sightedness

[Maine Sail]

Sure it is. Burning boats are a liability to the marina and adjacent boats. And boat-side connections are a big culprit. Keep your boat in someone's marina and you are subject to a long list of their rules.

That doesn't mean they have to be smart rules.

Yep and the sheer stupidity of it all is that the twist-lock plugs have been the origination point of hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. One twist-lock fire alone was in excess of 6 million....

I also find it quite amusuing that these marinas only care about what is on the outside of your boat... 55% of all boat fires are electrical and only a small chunk of that 55% are shore power related. 99.5% of boats don't even come close to meeting minimum accepted safety standards for electrical systems.....

Keep in mind that all standards organizations stop at the dock pedestal. Once on-board your boat they are merely suggested best safety standards, unless your insurer says otherwise...

 

[Maine Sail]

This might go deeper. There might be a clause in the marina's insurance policy that might require all electrical connectors to be UL approved. If the use of SmartPlugs is to proliferate they will need to get the UL endorsement. Yes, Underwriters Laboratory is a business and they work in conjunction with Insurance companies and manufacturers and to get their certification will cost money and perhaps expose patent information to the competition. Welcome to America.

It is all in process. UL could not test the SP to UL because it was not twist-lock.. Stupid, but that is how UL works.. Hubbell basically wrote the initial test standard because they had a patent on the twist-lock. The UL testing standards included a requirement for twist-locking thus barring SP from even being tested despite the safety being multiples better than the twist-lock......

The land based standards have now been fully re-written to include the Smart Plug and Marinco & Hubbell lost and this was a MAJOR, MAJOR win for Smart Plug.... The product will remain patented, they will pass UL easily, and they will now have access to a multi-billion dollar commercial and industrial market that now no longer requires only twist-lock....

The powers that be at NFPA & NEC agreed with the safety aspects of the SP enough to re-write the rules to include it, despite Hubbell & everyone else fighting tooth and nail against it... Sometimes the good guys, the guys actually trying to do something safely, do win...

The sheer fact that the twist-lock still has or is a UL product is a complete and utter joke and should be an embarrassment to UL and the entire electrical industry. If a fresh standard was written today that product would never pass safety muster but because it was invented in 1938, and was grandfathered in, we still allow its use today.. Sad, really, really sad...

 

[thinwater]

Or just change the wording to read " shall meet or exceed UL requirements".

No. Though I don't care for UL politics, I've seen this phase used by too many rap products to maneuver around key requirements. In this case, for example, it does not meet to the twist lock requirement, so this wording change would not help. Another common wording is that a product "meets the performance requirements" of a certain standard. The problem there, for example, is that they could meet them in a way that is not durable or safe in the long run.

The answer is to educate standard users that there are often several applicable and accepted standards, or to meet all of them. The latter (meet all of them) is often impossible due to conflicting requirements. For example, UL should either write a separate standard for plugs that lock by other means, or add a subsection that allows for testing of other locking methods.

But it is very dangerous to accept a standard in part (performance only) and no savy regulation writer will do that. It is the same as quoting someone out of context.

 

[Chris Patterson]

And the 'cigarette lighter' plug/socket still exists...

 

[Art Dennis]

Here is a recent article in Boat U.S.'s Seaworthy Magazine: http://www.boatus.com/seaworthy/magazine/2015/january/shorepower-cords.asp