Shore Power

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BarrenRiver

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Joined
Nov 21, 2002
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10785
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215
This is what can happen when your shore power cord becomes loose and starts arching..Luckily the owner was on the boat. The plastic of the pedestal melted onto the breaker and it couldn't be turned off. Prime example of why all all ends should be taken off yearly and screws tighten down on the wires and the connectors are twisted into place when hooked up

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Thank God he was on the boat at the time.
 
Actually thank god it happened on the pedestal side...

That's why I prefer hard wiring the shot power cord on the boats side, you eliminate the risk of fire due to loose plugs. In most cases you can set up the cord in a storage locker, hard wire it
Inside with a breaker. After all this is how it is we up on larger boat with cable masters

That s how I set up the 30amp cord on th sailboat I built, it s just a 30 amp cord used mostly for battery chargers but the I cut the end of the cord and connects it directly to the
main breaker on the panel, which is just 12" from where th cord gets in the boat. Keep in mind that abyc standards mandat a breaker if the panel is 8' or more from where the shore power come in.

One last thing, I routinely check he shore power plugs and cord for heat, as oftn as daily, easy when getting on an off th boat,
 
Wonder why more people are not using arc protection on these things.
 
quote:
Originally posted by GeeBee

Wonder why more people are not using arc protection on these things.

Click to expand...


Arc protection? Pls elaborate.
 
Pascal - that is a good suggestion that I will add to my list of things to do when getting on and off the boat - lay hands on the plug ends to test for heat. We do it here at work as part of the end of day walk through. Don't know why it never occurred to me to do it at the boat.
 
KiDa, while we are familiar with GFI (Ground fault interruption) there is also Arc sensing interruption. This has great value in bedrooms with electric blankets. It a wire breaks and becomes intermittent, the arc protection will shut the feed off. It is perhaps over kill unless it happens to you.
 
Interesting. I had never heard of Arc-Fault Circuit Interrupters before reading this. They do sound like a good idea , but....?:

For use with shore power , given a choice (and legally there may not be a choice) between AFCI and GFCI pedestal outlets, which would you choose? Doesn't the usual ( and code-required?) GFCI device tend to protect people better?

Also, even though the AFCI's are supposedly designed to sense the difference, I wonder are they sensitive enough they ever trip just from normal safe switching arcing vs. a serious arcing issue?
 
Need to choose? I opt for the GFCI. Once upon a time, I had a boat with which we cruised from first light to dark. Before first light I would make a pot of coffee. I would plug in the coffee maker in the dark and on two occasions got between the hot line and the grounded metal face plate. It bites but not as bad as a bee. Not even a fire ant. And there is no residual poison.

While the arcing, fire starting bad wire is a threat, you have a chance to wake up and get out.
 
All new home builds are required to have arc fault breakers now, it wasn't 6 months after we moved in I changed a couple out to regular breakers....Seemed like every time you turned around to flip on a light switch or plug in the vacuum they would trip. The electrician even said after the final inpsection you'll be changing these expensive bastards out..
 
quote:
Originally posted by GeeBee

You can have your cake and ice cream.

https://www.geindustrial.com/produc...d-fault-combination-arc-fault-circuit-breaker

Click to expand...


That GFCI/AFCI link references "more than 67,000 home fires claiming more than 485 lives and injuring 2,300 victims annually" that seems to infer those fires were caused by electrical arcing, but with no information by me to back it up I suspect perhaps 90-99%(?) of those fires may have been due to some other cause.

I wonder how many people will know or remember when needed, to switch that breaker all the way off, press & hold a button , switch the breaker back on and then release the button after 3 seconds in order to reset.

The concept is great but if they are too sensitive as Barren River points out, people will just replace them with more reliable breakers.
 
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