Breakages, failures, and frustration...
20 December 2014 | Tenacatita Bay, Mexico
Mark
I haven't talked about it in our blog so far, but it has been a very tough last few weeks in terms of breakages on the boat. Nothing too major, luckily. But, we are dealing with a whole group of small problems, failures, and systems that aren't working as expected.
As an example...
Our fridge seems to be running almost non stop when it should only run about 12 hours a day. Of course, this takes a lot of electricity and means that I have to run the generator to make up the power that our solar panels can't supply.
Our watermaker was also having productivity problems, but it looks like I've solved that one for now.
Our microwave started turning on automatically every time that we plugged it in. So, we replaced it and the new one started having the same problem within the week. Some of you more technical people will be saying that is because our inverter must have a square sine wave which sensitive electronics don't like. But, that's not it as we have a true sine wave inverter. So, the mystery continues, but I am down two microwaves and don't really want to buy a 3rd one.
There are a bunch of other small items that keep needing fixing and replacing, just enough to give me a bit of frustration each day. But, tonight, we can add one more potential bigger problem. Our generator just stopped putting out voltage while still running. Remember that we need to run it often because the fridge is using more power than it should? We still have the boat engines to generate power, but that is pretty inefficient compared to the generator.
Problems and breakages are normal on a boat, especially one that is getting full time use like ours. But, it is still hard to take when it seems that everyday we have a new issue to deal with. Argh!
Adding to my personal frustration is a very sore back that I have been dealing with this last week. Normally, I enjoy the boat projects, but when I can hardly turn my head, handing upside down into a locker is much less fun.
So, enough whining for now. I will put my "big boy pants" on first thing tomorrow morning and get back to work, first trying to diagnose the failed generator. Hopefully, we can go a whole day without something new to add to the list.