Time to play electrician

After cutting some crucial wires last weekend, I decided to have a look at the current wiring.

I was not impressed. My mind was made up, and I was going to rewire the boat. While I was at it, I decided to add some new sockets, switches, and maybe even a fuse or two.

$200 on Amazon prime and a 6 pack later this is what we get:




   
          





Lots of wiring, two days, several beers.

At the end of it all it was images like this that made it all worth it.

Backing up a bit, I will explain a few of the details of what I did here. The Osprey came with a shore power outlet, which wired through a breaker panel into one GFCI outlet.This one GFCI outlet was getting on my nerves, as to get power to the front of the boat I had to run an extension cord out in the open, which cluttered the boat and stressed me out for some strange reason.

The boat also had a 12 volt system that ran from the battery, into a panel mounted on the wall. When you opened this panel a spaghetti monster would jump out at you which was poorly labeled and impossible to make sense of, not to mention I had just cut the power to the lights the night before and now the lights don't work...

My grand idea was to run six new 110 volt GFCI protected sockets and four 12 volt fuse protected sockets. I wanted to move all of the electrical components away from the floor and clean up the look of the boat.

The first step was to cut the hole for the wall mounted fuse panel out larger to now house all of the electrical components. I then ran new 12 gauge wires to the battery and installed buses for both the positive and negative cables. I also ran 12 gauge (after researching code) wires to all locations in the boat that I wanted a 110 volt outlet.

Beginning with the 110 volt system, Ryan made a template and cut holes in the locations for the new plugs. We then glues in new receptacle boxes and connected them up. (This is a summary, it took two days!) I now have shore power coming into three 15 amp breakers, one for the battery charger, and one day refrigerator, one for the starboard 110 power, and one for the port 110 power.

Next on the list was the 12 volt system. Lots of wires were cut and re-run. Lots of excessive wires were removed and thrown out. I now have 10 switches running through 10 fuses of various amperage running about the boat in a clean manor.

There are a few 12 volt additions still to be made, and I expect to hit them in the coming weekends.

• 12 volt light strips 
• Anchor light
• Cockpit lighting
• Masthead light

A big bonus to the rewire, and thanks to Ryan, we discovered the head unit, which had all of its wires cut and was deemed by the previous owner as a hole filler, worked! We wired it to the speakers, and now I have tunes!

Bluetooth to be added soon.