As you may recall, in Panama, we had a catastrophic failure of our ARCO Zeus alternator regulator. The summary was that there was a mandatory software update, and the update caused the unit to malfunction and over voltage our main 12-volt electrical system. This caused our battery manager, in an effort to protect the batteries, to disconnect 12v power from the boat. Without the 12v power we lost radar, charts, GPS, lights, and various other systems. We also had a fire suppression system that shut down the main engine because it thought the loss of power was due to fire. Ouch. Fortunately, the failure happened someplace where we were not in danger, but that was mostly luck. Had we been someplace else when the boat suddenly stopped operating, we likely would have crashed into something. We also had enough emergency and backup systems that we were able to quickly gain control of the boat (we literally had a back up propulsion engine, as well as three other batteries banks to power the boat).
To continue cruising, the temporary solution was running the generator to power the batteries instead of using the main engine alternator while underway.
The company who installed the upgraded battery system, including the alternator regulator, was Weber Marine. Even though we in no way blame Weber for the situation, they covered replacing the ARCO Zeus as part of their warranty on their work.
David from Weber Marine flew in on Sunday, June 8 so that he could start work on Monday morning. When we’d scheduled this trip, Kosmos was supposed to already be back in the water and thus the A/C working. Having to do this project on the hard with no A/C was painful. Also, the yard hours were limited, so Eric and David couldn’t come in early to work during the coolest part of the day.
The first thing that David did was clean up the bypass from the battery disconnect job that Eric had done. Eric had bolted together two wires in a quick fix. David changed it to a proper rotary switch.
While David worked on the switch, Eric wired in a new cable so that the ignition could be relatively quickly be unplugged from the regulator at the helm. This was a hard fail-safe to disable the regulator if there were problem.
The next thing David did was to unwire and remove the ARCO Zeus box. When we’d last heard from ARCO, they said that they’ve changed their firmware update policy so that updates are no longer mandatory in order to operate the boat anymore, thus we’d never be put in a potentially life endangering situation again. However, that didn’t change the fact that the update had made the box non-operational for us. Eric did not trust ARCO and did not want that box on our boat anymore. There was only one other alternative, Wakespeed, so we were replacing the Zeus with the Wakespeed. By the time the Zeus was removed, the work day was over and the yard kicked them out.
On Tuesday, they put in the Wakespeed alternator regulator box and wired it up. That all went smoothly, but when it came time to program the unit, they had problems. It wasn’t updating properly through Bluetooth. Eventually, they found out there was known issue with the app on both iOS and Android for Bluetooth that stopped them from being able to program it with the app. That was remedied by using a USB cable to do the update.
Once the programming was done, they started the engine to try it out. It didn’t work. They spent the rest of the day changing the settings to try to find a setting that worked.
On Wednesday, David realized they had the wrong wiring harness for the N-type alternator aboard Kosmos — they had a P-type wiring harness. They called around to all the local retailers and no one had the correct cable in stock. Towards the end of the day, someone suggested that they try the manufacturer direct. The first retailer they’d contacted had indicated that the manufacturer wouldn’t deal with the public, but Eric decided it wouldn’t hurt to try. The manufacturer said they’d send it out that day.
Eric felt like he could handle it from there, so David caught a flight back to San Diego. Eric tried to pay David for the flight/work since we did not believe Weber was responsible for the ARCO/Zeus failure, but David was adamant it was all covered by their warranty. David took the ARCO/Zeus box with him and is going to fight with ARCO to refund him.
On Thursday, the cable arrived around noon. Eric spent the afternoon wiring in the harness for alternator regulator. As you can see, there were lots of wires that needed to be spliced in, and it was quite a bit of work.
At first the new regulator seemed to work, but it only ran at half-power. Eric adjusted the settings and was able to get it to work.
We were a little nervous about not having much time to test it out before we do the passage to Chesapeake, but if something were to go wrong, Eric could do a quick disconnect to disable the alternator regulator and we’d go back to using the generator. And, if we really needed to stop, there were lots of places to go all along the way.