Boat Zincs Getting Eaten by Stray Voltage

well my day's not ending or going as planned it's got a phone call for a 9-1-1 I had to run all the way across town I was downtown now I'm back over here on Stock Island the guy called in a panic he was uh getting on a plane to Hawaii and he said that his zincs on the boat which zincs are a sacrificial anode that we put on trim tabs and running gear and things like that so that it eats on the zinc instead of eating on the actual parts of the boat his are actually boiling so that means that there's some major electrolysis and it's actually pretty dangerous it could be the boat could start on fire inside somewhere uh if somebody got in the water and it's bad enough they could be electrocuted that warrants uh 9-1-1 status so headed down to go take a look at that right now [Music] today's weather is 80 degrees it feels amazing for December no chance of rain when we woke up this morning it was about 69. all right here we are let's take a look and see what we got going on happy see down there just turned off the shore power just gonna check all these plugs first [Music] they have the smart plugs which these are these are plugs so I'm just going to check them off those are both good let's go back here and check all these so [Music] foreign [Music] well I didn't find any smoking guns on the shore power cord I guess I'll uh hop down in the hatches and see what I can find down in the engine room see if there's a galvanic isolator or something like that in the boat that I'm going to is right over there let's go see what we can figure out always hate getting those 9-1-1 calls because people are in a panic not really knowing especially since he was getting on a flight he had 10 minutes to talk to me and tell me what was happening before he was boarding so I'm here to meet the mechanic there he is [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign hook my meter up to the bonding system see if there's a reason why these things are frothing yeah the trim tabs how are they getting found this little guy a little damsel fly I think correct me if I'm wrong hmm somehow we have one and a half volts DC getting into the trim tabs and bonding system exactly sure what's going on here so I shut off the batteries I'm gonna go shut off the shore power and then I'm going to retake my readings and see if I still read voltage on those trim tabs in the bonding system [Music] foreign [Music] power disconnected and the batteries turned off I'm still getting a volt and a half DC through the bonding system so I don't know if somebody else's boat is leaking or the shore power is leaking into the water I don't know what I'm going to do is I think everything's okay for tonight I'm going to have to come back tomorrow with our test set and it has a special probe silver chloride probe that you put down on the water and then you can take readings on items on a boat and see what's going on [Music] so I'm just putting everything back the way I found it because like I said I don't have the test set right now [Music] that's how everything was so I'm going to leave it something here real quick I just found the owner's manual I hope there was supposed to be a panel there where the shore power comes in there's supposed to be some dlci [Music] I found some [Music] okay the circuit interrupters are working I don't see anything problems there okay so since I'm here I just noticed that this strike plate for the door is loose so I'm just going to tighten it up real quick all right well let me show you the test set real quick it's called a corrosion reference electrode and it's some kind of silver chloride probe that you put in the water next to the boat and then you take readings and it has to be the boat reading should be within a certain value on the multimeter so I'll show you this as we go through it we're just trying to check and see if there's actual electrolysis on the boat or if it's next to the boat in the water or on the dock or what so what we have here this is a reference probe it's a silver chloride it's the probe is actually inside that metal tube and what we do is we put this down in the water close to the metal fittings running gear whatever you want to call it that's in under the boat and then we take here to hold it in place put the probe in the water right here it's a silver chloride probe and it can measure the resistance in this system so then what we do is we have this probe it's hooked up to the negative right here on our multimeter I have this set for volts DC and then what we do is we take the red probe and we round it to the engine block right there and you can see we've got 9.59 all right now I'm going to try something else really quick too there's part of the bonding system right down here see this green wire that's part of the bonding system and I'm going to touch this thing like that and we get 961. we go to our book and we look at chart right here go halt type we have fiberglass Hall with inboard engines there's your Volvo inboard motor right there and our range should be 550 to 1100 so we are within that range so that means that uh here a reading within the recommended range indicates the vessel's underwater mile metal in electrical contact with the digital multimeter is protected against corrosion so we're looking good so I did multiple tests I turned off the charger inverter and tested and got the same good numbers in that range he had replaced a fuse on there so I just wanted to make sure that I removed that from the equation also tested all the bilge pumps I read the all the bilge pumps test good with no signs of uh anything out of that value we tested it with the short power cords disconnected I tested them with the shore Powers cords connected and Shore power on I tested both sides of the boat and yeah I think we're good so I'm gonna wait till CJ the diver comes and changes out all the zincs then I'll come back and do a quick reading one more time just to make sure we're in in that value of note is uh the client just told me that this sailboat right here he just recently rewired and put new plugins on the show power cords just before this all started occurring so I'm going to let the facilities manager know that that boat right there may be the problem with this one with the zinc so we just finished up which was the electrolysis boat we had problems with the zincs where he said they were foaming they really weren't it just was they were getting ate up I tested it with with our test set and measured the potential and resistance and everything on the boat check good we had a diver come change out all the zincs put new zincs on and I went back tested it one more time and I'm sure that the boat's good everything checks good within limits and I suspect that there's a sailboat across the way that is leaking electrical charge into the water that's eating up the guy's ink so I think the plan is to move the I think the marina is going to move the boat to a different slip so we shall see that sailboat right there used to belong to General Patton the guy from World War II [Music] foreign for now

Channel: Will Fix That

Views: 16,938

Keywords: boatrepair, boats, mechanic, mechanics, electrical, Mattmobilemarine, mobilemarinerepair, yacht, yacht repairs, we fix boats, boat repairs, boat maintenance, running gear, maintenance vlog, boat repairs maintenance, stray current, stray voltage, galvanic corrosion, repairing boats, bonding system, boat electrical systems, stray current detector, stray current tester, zincs, boat zinc replacement, anodes on a boat, boat repair business, boat maintenance and repair

Id: ly_tJgN_rac

Length: 11min 35sec (695 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 30 2022