A couple of months before we went cruising we bought a new reverse cycle air conditioning system for our boat. We were tied up to a dock in Charleston working on getting our liferaft installed when I smelled burning plastic and heard some weird noises. I quickly ran through our boat and tracked it down to under our v-berth where the A/C system had been installed. Ripping open the top of the v-berth I noticed small puffs of smoke coming out of the controller box for the compressor. I disconnected the power in just the nick of time. When I opened the box up there was a 10AWG wire stretched tight across all of the other components inside. It had come in contact with a processor or something that was hot, melted through and was causing a dead short inside the unit. This had nothing to do with any of the ABYC compliant wiring within any other part of our vessel. It was due to poor quality control by the air conditioning manufacturer. We don't pull apart every piece of mechanical and electronic gear before we install it on our boat (generator, AC, instruments, pumps, etc.) to make sure everything is good, and in this case we could have had a serious electrical fire starting on board.

We're at a marina now and I'm always amazed at the number of people who leave their air conditioning systems on when they are away for the week (for the above reason, and also because it's such a flagrant waste of energy). When we leave our boat we shut off EVERYTHING except for the barograph (kind of hard to see a trend if you turn it off all the time), bilge pump and shower sump (acts as a secondary high water bilge pump). If something shorts out and there's nobody there, is it really shorting out? The answer is yes.

I'm just sayin'...