Water Tank Sender/Gauge Wire Color

[Dan]

Hi all:

The wiring between one of my water tanks and my tank gauge corroded. Instead of patching the old wire, I'm simply snaking a new wire run from the sender to the gauge. The wire attached to the gauge is white, and the ground wire is black. The wires attached to the sender are pink and black.

My question is: What is the "right" color for this application? I usually can't remember what I had for breakfast. Not having a consistent scheme, I'm sure, will bite me in the backside years from now when I come across a wire that looks vaguely familiar, but can't remember what it's for.

All I come across for sale is red/black duplex or red/yellow duplex. Would I use either of these?

Also, I can't get that wire into the harness. How do I make it as professional looking as possible despite that?

Thanks in advance.

 

[ITMaster]

You Wouldn't Happen To Have

an owners manual for that boat would you? If you look in there, you should have a schematic that would help you pick out the wiring colors.

You mention that the wiring is for the tank level and a guage that indicates how much water is there, and you want to know what the "right" wiring should be.

IMHO, it should not be white and black, since my presumption would be that this is a low voltage DC signal that should be carried from the sending unit to the guage. On a boat your size, you should have both shore 120 Volts AC shore service and 12 Volts DC ship power supply off your batteries.

The new ABYC standard calls for Yellow for your ground wire and Red for your hot wire for DC voltage. This is a problem since your boat may be an older vintage that used Red and Black for postitive and ground respectively. White for neutral and Black for hot and Green for ground is the standard for AC voltage. To really confuse you, some European standards use to run the ground on a brown wire.

When running wiring for differnt types of voltages and using the same color wiring, you run a good risk to fry your back side, since as you stated that your assumption is that the black is ground, yet with your high AC voltage on the boat, the black should have 120 volts.

A nice easy way to get killed. If you are absent minded and have trouble with your memory (out of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most ) or don't know, I would get someone to help you out before you do harm to the boat or yourself.

Good Luck, Tom

 

[Don12364]

"To really confuse you, some European standards use to run the ground on a brown wire".

Euro standards have been for very many years:-
Brown = AC live(Hot) (NOT GROUND as stated above).
Blue = AC Neutral
Green/Yellow = Ground
Red = DC Live (Hot)
Black = DC Negative

Of course there are some who do their own wiring so, unless certain it is best to check by tracing a particular wirer if possible.

 

[ITMaster]

My Bad Donalex

You are correct and this is a major mistake that is easy to make.

This just goes to show how ambigiuious and confusing AC & DC systems can be and how it gets even worse when we step outside "our" standards normally used in the US and bring IEC into the mix.

The point I would like to make here is that our standards are a problem, since ABYC standards have changed within the last 8 to 10 years and that in a boat that has both AC and DC systems, what one thinks is a ground in reality could be L1 voltage with enough current to be fatal. At least the council recognized that and has gone to yellow for grounding in DC systems here in the US.

This has always been a peeve of mine. The majority of us learned metric over the last 40 or more years and yet we still have a mix of measure with all of our systems.

http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_5/chpt_2/2.html

Check this link for a more explicit overview and understanding with regard to electricity.