Pop Goes The ....

The Fisher King was sitting in the usual place doing his Teaching Textbook 7.  I was sitting on the opposite settee looking for parts to rebuild our furler.  Remember that damn catamaran?  The rebuild from that is almost done by the way.  Then it happened, a loud POP!  We have a container of SLX sitting outside in the cockpit that has been making pops all week as it heats and cools.  But this one was more intense, demanding your attention.  

Standing in the small galley of the Vega and with the help of the Fisher King it didn't take long to find the small stream of smoke rising from the inverter.  Damn.  The Coleman inverter that was installed by one of the previous owners had finally given up the ghost.  For over a year it had been running without the little cooling fan making all that noise (our loads are not very big and it seemed to get along just fine).  But today it was just "on" with nothing plugged in.  We forgot to turn it off when we unplugged the laptop a couple days ago to get the battery bank to 100% before shoving off.  It has been nice and quite without that fan

The house bank has over 450 amps!  This could have been disastrous!  We found out the hard way that the inverter was on the ships main breaker which was large enough NOT to trip!  For the time being we will have to run the small inverter until we get farther south.  We will also put a breaker inline to prevent this possible fire hazard in the future.  

So we have another project to do before we leave!  I'm glad we already have the breaker!  And the wire!  and the terminals!  So it shouldn't take too long.

Sorry no pictures of the smoking inverter or it being tossed in the dumpster today!

W