Fabrication, rewiring and cleanup of electrical panel on a 35' Beneteau racer/cruiser sail boat; including installation of three battery banks, echo charger and inverter. Extensive NMEA / SeaTalk integration of instruments with autopilot, GPS, radar and laptop computer.

This job involved the first custom panels, originally Jonathan, the boat owner,  and I would sit down at his computer and design panels for my customer's boats.

This job was so reliable that it was 15 years later, I was walking down the dock and Jonathan said he was having battery issues, turns out batteries can last a long time sometimes.

Jonathan successfully raced the boat with this configuration in the Lake Ontario 300 ( I was crew for five of those races) and the LOSHRS series and early on the LORC series ( I was crew for a season)

The main reason we completed this job, was the original French designed panel was touch sensitive and worked well until the voltage dropped to around 11.5 volts while racing the boat and then it would have a mind of it's own. So switching out to American style Breakers/Switches solved this issue. The only issue we ran into after that was we had to run a blower hose to the alternator which was thermostatically controlled to turn on when needed to cool the alternator when we asked the alternator to output maximum power to charge both house banks.

“Richard worked on a number projects on my family’s Beneteau 35S5 – Windriven – including a comprehensive re-design and upgrade of the electrical system as well as addition of upgraded instrumentation (with integration for laptop-based navigation). The systems were cleverly engineered and performed very well for many years. The custom electrical panels were a beauty to behold and use – a significant improvement over the original parts. One feature highly recommended was the additional of an Echo-Charger to isolate and charge the starting battery.”

Regards, Jonathan