Alarming news
28 January 2014 | Salinas, Puero Rico
The other morning, after being rudely awakened in the middle of the night by a malfunctioning alarm, I took a screw-driver, and a pair of wire cutters and disabled all of the alarm systems on board Picaroon. They had been driving us mad, going off at random times for weeks, it was time to take drastic action.
Now you might think that this was an act of folly, but it had to be done for the sake of our sanity. You see the thing is that Picaroon used to be owned by a rocket scientist who obviously loved alarm systems and I’m sure he knew what he was doing when they were installed. The problem with alarms though is that you need to know why an alarm has activated, or it’s just an annoying noise that you want to turn off.
For instance, we have a little round thing that sits on the cabin-floor, the label on its side says it’s a vapour alarm. That, we suppose means it will go off when there is gas in the boat, which is a great idea. It activates when we turn on the shower pump, DOH! And makes an excruciating noise for about ten seconds then stops, which is weird to say the least. When I finally trace the cable, this morning of the long knives, I discover it has been hooked up to the power switch that turns on the shower pump. The so called alarm noise is not a gas alarm but, I suppose an indication that it is now awake and ready to smell gas. But as we never installed this and there was no instructions it had been a mystery as to why it made such a fuss when we went for a shower. I disconnected it, and sometime soon I’ll wire it up properly and install it in the bilges, which is where it should be. There’s not a lot of point of having the boat half full of gas before your alarm goes off and in the meantime we’re turning off the gas at the bottle, when we go to bed, well that’s the plan, although I must say that at the wrong end of a bottle of vino this sometimes gets overlooked, but that’s our plan.
The next system for the chop that morning was our very hi-tech energy monitor, called Emon for short. This little baby is supposed to look after our batteries; it can tell us all sorts of interesting facts. That is, it could do if it had been set up right, in the first place, and maybe in the first place it was, but now it just seems to emit this annoying high pitched beep with no indication of why. It’s a bit like our old car that used to make the same alarm sound to tell you that you hadn’t fastened your seat belt, or that the door was open, could be any door, or that the boot was open, or the lights were on etc., etc. Well our Emon, was out of the same stable, and the fifty page manual wasn’t written in a way that could be understood by any human with a modicum of intelligence.
I took out the screws holding it into its casing and pulled the multipin plugs from its circuit boards as it played daisy daisy give me your answer do, like Hal in 2001. In future I will test the batteries with my multi-meter from time to time, and pop the engine on to charge them up when the lights start to dim, I think that will make for a simpler system, and no more trying to wrestle with the curious readouts that Emon likes to flash up on its little display.
Also in the frame that morning was a panel that has about ten little lights on it all with labels that we never got to grips with. The mysterious Isol-Elim, was on this panel, Racor, and Eng H 2 O and burglar along with a few other. These maybe important, but today I was in no mood to find out, I was on a mission. This particular alarm, with its on-off on-off high pitched squeak had activated when we went for a sail around, telling us that the oil pressure was a problem, but the oil pressure gauge said all was ok. We silenced it at the time by placing a cushion over its speaker. Why it never came on when we were just running the engine to charge the batteries seemed strange. That was until I discovered that this alarm panel was wired to the navigation equipment. This meant that it would only be on when we were at sea, so why did it have an alarm light on it for a burglar? I disconnected its main feed.
Since then we have had a very peaceful vessel, we haven’t sunk, been gassed or run out of power so we will stay unalarmed for the time being, it makes for a much less stressful life.