"Little problem"


Is till remember in India, when Anka told us that her maid has burned her passport while trying to get it dry over the gas stove. "Little problem with your passport mam".
This is what i thought when i realized that the new cable for the masthead tricolor has not been placed in the tube inside the mast which is used as cable canal but just inside the mast itself. It is slamming like crazy and so today we had to fit 2 maststeps up there to then undo the complete top of the mast tomorrow.
Also i realized on the way to Alvor that one Alternator (the left one) does not seem to charge at all.
A little bit of measuring and testing (roughly 2 hours) and i was sure that it is the "load repartitor", a Studer MBI 2/100/3 which has died on one port. This means that one engine is giving all power to one starter battery and nothing to the main batteries or the other starter and that the other input is fine.
When i switched the input cables on the alternator the other motor was not charging, so it is not at all an alternator problem of one of the engines.
Good news was that using a mirror and a digital cam i could take a picture of the label of that "thingy" and google that it was a swiss company. I called them at 11.03 and YES; in Switzerland it was 12.03 and all technicians were for lunch for 2 hours. Maybe i should consider siwtzerland as another country :-) for an expat job.

But then they were really helpful and agreed that this part seem to have died. Even though they not deliver to end customers normally they agreed to do it. So we will have to wait for a parcel from switzerland which will be send to the marina before we can take off to Madeira.
Also the trampoline is not repaired yet, the white rockets did not arrive (we can get those later), the life vests are still for service (this was supposed to be a 1 day job) and so on.
One engine was using a lot of oil but i realzied that a filler cap was loose.
So i slowly fill up the oil now.

The fridge was not keeping temperature (the old one) and it could be either lack of cooling fuid or the thermostat.
We now set it it to almost max and it is now around 9 Celcius inside.

The Mastervolt BTM battery meter only shows amps going out but no charging at all.
I can clearly see from the voltage that charging IS happening.

Also i checked the settings for the normal Dolphin 40A charger and it is correct set to wet lead acid batteries.

I keep on wondering why the solar panel is pumping 38A but somehow the battery does not show full?

All in all.... we are progressing but the 2 do list keeps getting longer.

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