How to Maintain Boat Fuses

Video Transcript

"Hi. I'm Albert Hedgepeth with Expert Village. Today we are going to talk a little bit about boat maintenance. What do you do if one of your switches isn't working? How do you figure out where the problem is and what the break down is, why you're having an electrical problem? One of the first steps to correcting this is to actually understand the layout of your electrical system on the boat. Each boat is different. You are really going to have to study your manual that came with the boat or hire a professional electrician to come aboard and fix the problem. Some easy things that you can do on your own while you're out is to go ahead and check, first of all, that the master breaker is on. You want to go down into your cabin and make sure that your panel is setup for all the functions that you want and that they are keyed up and turned on. Then you might want to check, if that doesn't fix the problem, you might want to come up and just make sure that your fuse isn't loose and that the wiring hasn't come out of the fuse. You might also want to reset the fuse itself. Which a lot of boats have small little fuse panels with reset buttons. That might be something very easy you can do. You also might want to make sure that your batteries are charged and that the boat is getting power. That can be done if you have a battery checker or a lot of times you can just merely turn the key and look to make sure that the batteries are getting a charge. If the batteries are getting a charge then usually it's a problem between the switch and the device you are trying to work or the fuse itself has been popped for that specific item. At that point you would want to again go to your fuse panel and make sure that all your fuses are properly in place and that none of them are broken."