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The reason for this post is twofold. First to give me a permanent record of how all the wiring works on my Polycraft and secondly I hope this post and the wiring diagrams included may be of benefit to anyone setting up a series of complex 12V or 24V electrical systems on their boat.

 
If your buying a new boat and having it set up by someone other than yourself I suggest you take care to ensure that your requirements are detailed and that the person or persons doing the work have the appropriate skills to ensure that everything is set up in a way that the components don't conflict, particularly wiring, and that the complete set up will stand the test of time. If you don't the simplest of mistakes may come back to bite you.

That certainly happened with my 5.3 Polycraft which turned out to be a "sleeping giant" that took me a a lot of time and effort to come to grips with and even longer to rectify.

 
It seems to me that all new boats, and major repairs to older boats, have the potential to have some sort of teething problems. My boat had three:

ountered was fueling up the 120-litre fuel tank. Even at a very slow fill rate at the petrol station browser the boat fuel tank breather backed up and resulted in fuel blowing back out of the filler and being wasted. Persistence finally paid off and the breather was modified making it easier to refuel the boat.
1. The second problem was that the fuel gauge stopped working. Unfortunately I have not been able to get that working as well as I would like ... but that is manageable.
2. The sleeping giant of a problem was that all the wiring for the original electrics including 2x bilge pumps, radio, navigation lights as well as the transducer cable and of course the steering cabling and control wiring for the Yamaha outboard had all been tightly stuffed into a length of 70mm black flexible piping along the bottom of the the inside of the starboard side of the boat. That piping had obviously been installed when the boat was manufactured and then the inside of the wall of the boat above the piping had been "filled" with polyurethane foam. There was no access to the inside of the wall off the boat or the polyurethane foam or the black pipe ... wow. The piping ran from the stern of the boat to the centre console and was so tightly packed with all the above items that maintenance and upgrades were ridiculously difficult but if you read my notes on "my Polycraft repairs" you will see that where there is a will there is a way.

 
Mixed up with the above was a lack of understanding by the team that set the boat up for me. What they did not take into account was that in running the transducer cable in the same passage way as all the other electrics created electromagnetic interference (EMI) problems with the Garmin sounder. That EMI interference was also likely compounded by the power cable from the 80lb thrust Motor Guide (located on the starboard bow of the boat) electric motor / electric anchor. The wiring for that came into the 24V battery system for the Motor Guide trough the same 70mm hole as all the other wiring and the transducer cable as mentioned above. With the value of 20/20 hindsight I am confident that the closeness of the above two lots of wiring was responsible for interference on my sonar screen.
 
After careful consideration and investigation, I finally got it sorted in my mind and decided I had to basically rewire the boat to resolve the wiring conflicts. I came up with a three circuit plan that is now complete and I am very satisfied with the outcome and in particular the mitigation of EMI.

 
ORIGINAL CIRCUIT

The first step in the project was to removing the G54 Garmin transducer cable from the black conduit as well as the Garmin cabling from when the boat was delivered with my first Garmin installed.

By that time the upgrade to the original circuit was basically complete leaving just the steering cabling and control wiring for the Yamaha and the wiring for the original services, which included wiring for two x bilge pumps, a radio, alight bar and navigation lights in the black conduit.

That freed up valuable space in the black conduit which I am sure will make future maintenance easier.

 
GARMIN CIRCUIT

This was the most complicated of the three circuits to install as there was a lot of polyurethane foam that had to be removed to create room for two new channels for the two Garmin transducer and Garmin devise wiring to run through.



The first step was to create a channel through the top of the polyurethane inside the port side wall of the boat. That channel has two access/inspection hatches on the inside of the port side of the wall of the boat and one inside the port side of the front of the centre console.

That channel took a right turn when opposite the front of the centre console and went under the floor across to in front of the control panel and through an access/control hatch into the port side of the center console.

Those channels were for cables from the LVS32 and G56 as well as cables from the stern 95SV Garmin unit cables to run through.

The final channel had to be created from the bow of the boat along the floor of the bow storage compartment and up through the front of the centre console to the Network Expander.

Once the channels were complete the next step was to run all the Garmin wiring and cables down their respective paths and wire them up as required to each other and the control panel. That included the Garmin wiring from the original Control Panel on the starboard side of the boat.

I am getting great vision on all my Garmin sounder screens now and no longer have the EMI that I suffered when I first purchased the boat.

 
DC12V to DC24V CHARGER CIRCUIT & MOTOR GUIDE

A nifty addition to my Polycraft set up that facilitates longer running hours for the Motor Guide electric motor/anchoring system.

The top diagram below shows the wiring to the Motot Guide electric motor whereas the second photo below shows the Dc to DC charger set up in relation to the crank motor.

The crank motor is a 215 HP Yamaha 4 stroke and it has an alternator that Generates power to primarily keep the Crank Motor fully charged the. Power not required to bring the Crank Motor up to full charge goes to D12VC to DC24V charger. It converts the power not required by the Crank Motor from 12V DC to 24V DC and via positive and negative wires up a channel I created toward the top of the polyurethane foam in the starboard wall of the boat and to the 24V battery system. The red cable goes to the positive terminal of one of the two 12V batteries and the negative cable goes to the negative terminal of the other 12V battery.

24V SYSTEM




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