Lucky

As mentioned in the last post, we launched with charging issues. The engine start battery was dead so we replaced it on launch day when the engine didn’t start! The new Rutland 1200 hybrid controller was faulty and there had been no charging of the deep cycle batteries either in the 3 months out of the water. I decided last weekend to turn on the Dolphin marine charging system to slowly recharge the service batteries and leave them to trickle. The next day in the afternoon our daughter went to visit Silhouette to see the new sprayhood and phoned me to say there was a horrible rotten egg smell in the cockpit. She immediately pulled the shore power plug as it was pretty obvious a battery was “cooking”.

3 hours later I went on board to find one of the 180ah batteries still so hot I couldn’t touch it….. this was the closest we had come to a fire in all our years. It turns out the battery had a dead cell and wouldn’t show a voltage of above 12.1 so we’re guessing the charger just kept throwing full charge at it, but will now have to check that for a fault too.

We now have 3 new service batteries, 1 new engine battery and a repaired mppt controller, so hopefully the charging issues are sorted…. hmmm !