Today was rather frustrating, as I attempted to fix some electrical issues and ended up spending most of the day doing it and, in the end, achieving nothing at all. At least I didn’t make things worse. I was working on the computer when suddenly the power failed, this is supplied by a Victron inverter/charger which had stopped working for no evident reason. Turning the main switch to “Off” and subsequently back to “On” (a favorite trick with errant electrical devices) had no effect so I got worried, as the Victron is my main source of charging and 220V AC power. I changed the switches around and used the Xantrex inverter for the first time to get power to the PC so that I could call up the Victron manuals to see if there might be internal fuses or the like. The manuals showed no internal fuses so I didn’t know what I should do except wait for a while to see if the issue might have been caused by overheating.
While the Victron was cooling down I decided to investigate another electrical issue. I have two identical battery chargers from a French company called Cristec that had both stopped working at the same time last season; I hadn’t delved too far into the issue as I used the Victron for charging the batteries and hadn’t used the Cristec chargers in a long time. After accessing the units I checked to make sure that they were being supplied with 230VAC when the generator was running and that the various internal fuses were all working. No issues were evident there, either and nothing inside the devices looked burned or otherwise defective but neither worked. So, frustrated, I closed up everything again and the Victron functioned again when I turned it on. I’m not sure if it was my toggling the connectors or the device cooling down…
The rest of the day was spent paddle-boarding and swimming around and short snorkel excursion to see if there was anything exciting swimming or growing about. I thawed out my last steak and marinated it all day so dinner was a simple BBQ affair which was very tasty indeed.
