One of the most satisfying jobs we can do in a refit is to simply tidy up the wiring.
I took the above picture a few days ago. Certainly not perfect, and not as nice as I could do if I tore the whole works out and started again, but a heck of a lot better and easier to troubleshoot than it was when we got the boat two years ago.
Everything is now properly fused and labeled, and I also must have taken 50 pounds of unused or over-length wire out of the boat.
Cleaning up gave me space to move the AIS that some lazy tech had installed in the head to where it belongs, and to install a boat monitoring gadget (far left)—more on that coming in an article.
And best of all the high-voltage wiring is now safely covered. Here’s how.
And here’s a pic of the dog’s breakfast I started off with when we got the boat.
How do you deal with situations where you have proprietary connectors or molded connectors and a good deal of excess cable? This gets a bit untidy. I usually just coil up the excess and try to make it look neat, but would like something better. See the Dog’s Breakfast before photo for an example.
Hi William,
Yes, that’a challenge. One of the things I did was to completely redo the NMEA 2000 network and one of the reasons for that was to use the right length cables wherever I could. That said, I did not make up my own cables since that, while possible, adds unreliability.
Other than that, I do as you do, but try to have the coils outside the main panel area.