A month away, countdown to launch

It's now one month or 31 days until launch of Thanks Sweetie.  There's not much to report on other than the boat being out of the shop (covered last time) other than some minor items.

I spent my first dollars on boat related accessories this week -- fenders, screw-in snaps and some more water saddles, which aren't boat specific but proved to be a popular floating accessory last spring.

The fenders I told myself were a necessity and they sort of are.  I bought 6.5" fenders the first year we had our boat from Costco.  Fenders are strangely expensive and the no-name ones I bought from Costco were fine for our old boat which was much smaller.  But the new boat has both fender holders on the bow rails and it seemed natural that we would put fenders in them, and I bought a set of 6 8.5" from Overton's which had a 15% sale going on.  They were priced reasonably as fenders go, cheaper than the very expensive Taylor Made models that seem to dominate most retailers.  I also bought them in a cobalt blue which sort of matches the hull color.  The white ones tend to scuff and look dingy, so I figured a slight color mismatch was better than dingy in the long run.

I don't entirely know if I will really need them longer term -- we don't really dock many places, and transient docking or rafting doesn't seem all that likely for us, but they will probably be useful for the first few dozen docking attempts with this big boat.  I think tied up properly in the slip they won't really be needed -- the right rope lengths will hold the boat away from the slip and pilings.

I only need to replace one snap for the cockpit cover, but of course you have to buy a bag of 8 minimum.  I opted not to buy the needed epoxy for filling the spot where the old one pulled out, I need to see what the stripped hole looks like and whether I need to ream it out and then fill it and whether I should use a putty or a two-part liquid epoxy.

The water saddles (also from Overton's, 15% off) were kind of an impulse sort of thing but we have one I bought last year and it proved *ideal* for floating in the water.  It keeps me floating with just my shoulders at water level.  Now we'll have two others for guests.

I also picked up a spool of 1/4" bungee cord to make lanyards and retainer lines for them.  It dawned on me that instead of drilling a hole and using a short stub of ABS for a grommet that I could just make a loop of bungee which would fit over the notch of the saddle.

Escape from the shop and ready for launch

When we bought Thanks Sweetie we had a mechanical inspection that showed a laundry list of things in need of repair.  Most of them were wear-and-tear/periodic maintenance items that would need to be done sooner or later -- annodes, burned out light bulbs, worn bottom paint, impeller service, etc.

This all came to us thanks to a $995 maintenance inspection we paid for, which was given to us as a repair estimate by the dealership's shop who was providing brokerage.  We got a 10% price break when the seller accepted our initial offer and because most of the items were kind of wear and tear, periodic maintenance we didn't use it as a basis to try to negotiate more money off.  I assumed up front that something would need to get fixed and that it wouldn't be in like-new condition completely.

So we ran through what needed to be done and what we thought could be put off or done ourselves.  It's always a complex internal negotiation -- paying someone else to do it is easy, but it's also easy to bite off more than you can chew or not have the boat ready to run when we dunk it.  I spent 20 minutes on the phone with the shop accepting and rejecting the itemized estimate schedule and off it went.

Last week I got a call from the shop -- your boat's done, and since you won't launch for a month or so (actually 36 days from this writing, as if anyone's counting..) we'd like you to pay now.  I told them to email me the itemized invoice and I would call back with authorization.

Wow!  It was way more than I mentally expected.  In my mind, it was a little over $4000 but came to over $7000.  What the heck...  So I sat down and built a spreadsheet with columns for the estimates and the actuals for all requested repairs and the over/under of parts and labor for each itemized repair.  The tale of the tape was that parts were nearly $1000 over the original estimate, with three repair orders having parts overages of $250-$375.

I called the service contact back and complained about the gaps.  One overage was the result of data entry error on the invoice (charged for more parts than they used), two parts were completely mispriced on the estimate, and another was a "hidden" part not visible until disassembly.

After some back and forth about liability for erroneous estimates and concern that the estimate was deliberately misleading to enable the sale through their brokerage, the shop adjusted the invoice down by about $700, although in a byzantine way but cutting out labor charges for the most part -- ironically, the one item they came in UNDER the original estimate on.

I mostly felt like this was a victory, if a pyhric one.  Had they followed good shop procedure and just called me about the deviations, they might have gotten away with charging me more and in some ways I think I walked away with a better deal than had the estimate just been accurate.

I'm still somewhat perturbed by the process, though.  Having the brokerage and shop under one business umbrella is a huge moral hazard for them and allows them a lot of information asymmetry that can be used against me, and I kind of wonder what they didn't tell me to unload the boat and whether the inspection was all that comprehensive.  I'm not going to use this shop for any further maintenance -- they're 30-odd miles from my marina, and I have options closer with a shop the marina has a relationship with.

But I'm not on a campaign to bash the shop, either.  They did give back to me pretty easily (even if they had to) and it's not impossible a lot of it was just honest mistakes.

But regardless, we launch in 36 days and I can't wait.  It's going to be pretty early in terms of seasonality.  The lake is nearly ice free now, but it will still be dubious weather for active boating.  The good news is I will be able to get after the small-scale stuff like lightbulbs and the new boat name vinyl without bumping into actual boating season.

Project list

I need to start compiling a project list for the boat.  I got something of a head start last week on it, but there's a bunch of minor stuff.

• Batteries -- I gave in and decided to let the shop install new batteries.  I had planned to do this myself, either buying the batteries from Interstate myself or buying them through the marina (negligible cost difference).  I let MarineMax do it because the existing batteries are crap (old, wrong size, not AGM) and I decided the extra money would be worth not jumping into the engine room immediately.  Buying from the marina would have taken some of the DIY hassle away, but they may have wanted to install them (the owner is always looking for helpful labor service add-ons).
  
• Canvas repair -- the center panel front isinglass and the trip piece it connect to have a broken zipper connection.  I picked these up at the shop Saturday and will drop them off sometime this week to get fixed.  It looks like a simple repair for the canvas shop.
  
• Grill heating element -- the grill blows the circuit breaker, and from what I've read and had verified by the OEM, there was a design flaw in the element that causes moisture infiltration and shorting.  $75 and 10 minutes, or so I'm told.
  
• New Fenders -- The fenders for the old boat are pretty small.  The new boat has fender holders for ~8-9" fenders and needs larger ones.  I just looked at slip photos and don't know if I will need them other than one side of the slip, but I should probably have them for any docking or rafting situations.
  
• LED lighting replacement & Spotlight -- I want to replace all the lighting with LED bulbs.  Supposedly the bulbs exist for nearly all the lights.  Cuts battery consumption a lot, less heat in the cabin and probably superior light.  The spotlight needs a spotlight bulb (non-LED, sadly) but because that will be used so little it won't matter if its not LED.  This will probably be the first real DIY job besides the grill element.
  
• Battery monitoring -- I'm likely to go with the Balmar Smartguage, but it has the significant disadvantage of being kind of large and I don't have a great place to mount it.  There's no room on the MCP or the dash.  I did find a plastic enclosure that could be mounted to the MCP side face, but it's not very cosmetically appealing, but burying it elsewhere doesn't make a lot of sense, either, although perhaps inside a cabinet would make sense.  Cable routing from the engine room also seems intimidating, too.
  
• TV Replacement -- the existing cabin TV is an LCD analog set, which won't get digital TV signals.  It seems to be wired to AC, which make replacement simpler and cheaper.  But I couldn't see how to get it down to replace it, and it will probably require a new mount as well.

DC Power Monitoring

One of the first projects I need to take on with new boat (and one I always assumed would be necessary) is replacing all of the batteries.  There are four batteries on board, two parallel groups of two, roughly delineated as port and starboard batteries because one pair is the start battery for the starboard engine and one pair is for the port engine.

Beyond that distinction, my general understanding is that the cabin DC items (lighting, televisions, stereo, refrigeration) draw from the port battery and that the starboard battery supplies start power to the generator.  After that you have to decipher the electronic schematics which are engineering drawings in the manual, spread over about 8 pages and difficult to follow as uplinks and general logical layout aren't easy to follow (it would help if it was color coded and had some kind of block diagram of major segments).

It's not clear at all to me where navigation lighting, cockpit lighting, helm accessories or other dash power is derived from.  I have a vague understanding that it's split between both batteries.

Obviously good DC power is critical on a cabin cruiser -- at a minimum, you need to be able to start the engine.  And with all the accessories on board capable of running off DC power, monitoring battery status becomes kind of important.  We have the advantage of a 5 kw generator, but obviously in many cases we don't want to run it or run it all the time.

I've been looking into adding DC power monitoring.  One basic solution is adding an ammeter to monitor instantaneous DC loads.  Knowing the general battery Ah capacity you can guesstimate runtimes off straight DC power by knowing your load.  This is a crude method, though, so I've been looking at more sophisticated state of charge monitors that will tell me how much life the battery has left as well.

Most SoC systems and all ammeters require a shunt, an electronic component that produces a tiny bypass voltage the meter actually monitors.  The shunt needs to be inline with a cable from the battery (most use the negative side).  This is all fine until you look at the cabling associated with a shunt.  

Shunts are basically bare, surface-mounted terminal blocks meant to be mounted on a panel with the pass-through power and monitoring leads attached.  The battery cables, however, are "optimal length" for the existing install and don't include the extra length for shunt mounting and require you to make up or buy the second leg of the cable if your mounting location isn't right near the DC bus.

Of course on my boat, there's not really space close to the bus for this or enough extra battery cable length to locate it where there is is space without making up and running a new cable.  At $12/ft for 4/0 tinned cable, plus connectors and paying someone to crimp them for me (my hydraulic crimper won't do larger than #0), this gets expensive not to mention frustration inducing.

I'm actually surprised nobody has made up either an inline shunt that could be mounted on the battery side.  No mobile DC system built *without* a shunt will easily accommodate one without substantial rewiring.

There are two interesting alternatives, though.  The first is a very slick Maretron system which uses a ferric ring called a Hall effect transducer that just slips over the battery cable (no splicing or re-cabling required).  The downside is that it's an expensive system, probably running in excess of $1600 for the required components and cabling, although it is NMEA2000 compliant, meaning it can talk to other boat systems -- which I don't have anyway.

The next I just found out about, the Balmar SmartGauge.  This requires no shunt or transducer, just leads to the battery posts.  Nobody seems to know exactly how it works, but my condensed wisdom is that it probably samples voltage and pulses the batteries for internal resistance and has an algorithm for determining battery state of charge from models of these values.   It doesn't show instantaneous amperage, but nearly everyone says its as or more accurate than a shunt SoC meter and is self-calibrating/learning over time, including as the batteries age.

This one is likely to be the winner for ease of installation and accuracy of the most important information -- how much battery is left, and the bonus is that it can monitor two battery banks.  Everyone else's requires multiple meters, multiple shunts, etc.

It's an open question whether I'll actually "get to it" this season.  Replacing the batteries with proper Group 31 AGM cells is a $1200 check and I also will probably need to replace the cabin television with a digital broadcast model (my family insists), and I want to replace all the lighting with LED bulbs, which will definitely cut power consumption on batteries.

For now we'll just have to be kind of cautious about DC power consumption and be slightly more aggressive with generator usage, perhaps running it at anchor more often or for longer periods at night.  And we'll have shore power at the slip to run the battery charger to keep the batteries optimally charged when start out.

In an ideal world, much of this would already be in place and/or automated, including automatic generator start so you'd never have to think about it.  When the batteries hit 60% charge, the generator would kick in and run until the batteries were charged.  I don't think that's warranted for our use, but definitely something on a wish list.