This charger is buried back in a compartment behind the breaker panels. In order to check things out I have to pull the breaker panels from their mounts and stick my hand past all the wiring with a mirror. I would like to speak to the designer personally some time over that..........anyhow, the charger that is in the boat is not the one referenced in the owner's manual. Knowing the PO this is the original battery charger, he never used the boat enough to wear one out, but never the less the owner's manual for the charger is the wrong one. Sitting here I can't recall the manufacturer though.

This charger seems to work fine although has a built in issue. The absorption phase of charging is set manually, not by the charger sensing low voltage. Backing up a bit, the boat came from the factory with two group 31 batteries, unknown if they were DC or DP though. After researching the make and model on line I did end up finding the correct owner's manual and discovered this hard setting feature. The dip switches on the charger were set to group 31 mode for the first phase of charging. Supposedly, once this phase timed out the charger would go into a more voltage sensitive phase followed by the float phase. Fast forward now, the PO had his mechanic install and "maintain" two new batteries that were group 24's, no doubt neither the PO or mechanic bothered to research the charger and make adjustments, I found the batteries were boiled dry when I took them off the boat for winter storage a year ago. I replaced them with a group 27 starting and a group 31 house, based on what I could find on line, the recommendation was to set the dip switches on the charger to their lowest time setting which was for group 24's.

I believe that every time we return to the dock and plug in shore power, the charger starts the manual cycle regardless of the battery voltage. The question I can't answer is what else might trigger this? I'm hoping that a drop in voltage would cause the charger to go to the mid-cycle, then back to float. I think that would work fine.

I'm sure everyone is thinking that I should rip that charger out and I agree, BUT the wiring on this boat is like nothing I have ever seen. The charger appears to be an integral part of the DC wiring harness not something just wired to the battery terminals. Keeping in mind that the AC and DC panels have breakers on the front and back and also appear to control a series of relays built in to the panels with pretty stout bundles of wire going into the charger. To do this I think I would need to do a complete rewire with a new AC/DC panel and charger, frankly this boat is not worth that much time, effort or money to me. BTW, the photo shows only two of the four panels in the boat and does not show the back sides.