We dropped the mooring ball this morning and motored about two hours to the northeast to the Gulf Harbor Marina on the Caloosahatchee River, a very nice marina with floating docks. We plugged into shore power and I watched the control panel on the inverter/charger as Bud switched it on. No problems. The batteries were charging and we had pass-through power to the 110 circuits run from the inverter.

So, the inverter is OK, there must be some problem with the generator. After lunch and a walk for Matey we tackled the generator. It took about 45 minutes to back out the two screws that hold on the cover, about 2 minutes for the one in front and the rest of the time for the one you can’t see that’s partially blocked by the generator exhaust hose. Of course, once loose we found that there wasn’t room to actually remove the cover. You could push it back and get a two-inch slot to access the generator. According to the manual there are only four parts that wear out and might need to be replaced, the brushes, the capacitor, the rectifier and the bearings. The bearings are OK, so that left the other three. We could just see the brushes on outside and the capacitor. I was trying to download a technical manual for the unit which I hoped would tell us exactly how to access these parts, as it wasn’t obvious from the parts diagram we had and we’d be working through a 2-inch slot. Meanwhile, Bud noticed a tiny spot on a wire going over a metal bracket and to the capacitor. It looked like the insulation was worn and the wire had been arcing.

Could that be the problem? Could it be so simple? We couldn’t get electrical tape wrapped around it, no room. We tried slitting a piece of heat shrink wire wrap. We slid it on the wire, worked the slit side up and worked it down the wire until it covered the flaw. But when we heated it with the heat gun it curled back away from the wire instead of shrinking down onto it. Then we painstakingly took apart a heat shrink wire connector, to get the heavy heat shrink tube off it. We worked that onto the wire and slid it in place. The heat gun didn’t seem to affect it (we couldn’t get the heat gun closer than a couple of inches from it) so we tried our propane grill lighter. That seemed to partly melt one end, but at least it seemed like it was stuck in place. So we replaced the cover and the front screw and tried it. On the first try the control panel shut down. Bud wanted to try again with the air conditioner on to lower the voltage going to the inverter. It worked, it ran, it passed through current to the AC circuits and the batteries were charging.

So what was broken? Definitely the generator. And is it fixed? Maybe. We turned off the shore power for the evening to let the batteries run down and we plan to try it again in the morning. If it still works we’ll take the cover back off and check the placement of our improvised insulation. When we’re satisfied with that we’ll put the cover back and put both screws in. Then after laundry and some other chores we’ll leave this fine marina and go back to a mooring ball to wait for our weather window and see if the generator continues to work. My suggestion was that we sell the boat while everything was working!