And have been through several belts. I've changed brands to a supposedly higher quality. First, they tend to stretch a bit in the beginning I've found.

Bottom line is, when the batteries are down, with my regulator set to a full charge, the balmar alternator has quite a load. Because of my belt set up, they'll slip a bit at this time. I have a bit of fine dust from the belts I can see on the alternator. Before I did some work and changed the belts, I clogged my air intake filter with the rubber dust.

While I've done some better alignment on the pulleys which helped, I think one problem is the alternator shares the vbelt with the engines water pump so I don't have as much contact as I should nor do I want to overtighten the belts and put too much stress on the water pump.

The Gates belts I'm using are a little better but I may end up cutting my voltage back on my regulator to take some of the load off the belts.

I could set up a better pulley system but it's not worth it right now for how I use the boat.

Is this a new occurence or did you change something Max?