I was shocked (not literally) to discover 2 out 3 outlets on my Nonsuch 26#9 had reversed hot and neutral terminals when I tested them this morning.
Apparently this is very dangerous on boats. Has anyone else found this or checked thus out in their NS’s?
I did not fine that on mine. When I bought the boat the port side outlets did not work. The power and load lines were reversed on ght GFCI.
This is a simple tester and great to have on a boat - 110 vac outlet test simple tool - Search
I guess it’s easy to connect them wrong if you have taken the wires off to modify some things like put on a GFCI, but I hear that the later Nonsuch’s have reverse polarity indicator lights on the A/C panel?
I have the same tester you posted Joe. Works great and I would recommend folks get one and go around checking outlets on your boat and house. You might be surprised what you find.
Ken Julian
“Blue Note” NS26#9
Kingsville, ON
In a related matter my GFI plugs would trip between uses and I could not figure it out. I was changing my shore power plug with the more uptodate kind and when stripping the wires found corrosion on the green wire for over 10 feet. I bought a new cable. It’s easy to test simply measure the resistance on each wire in the shore power wire. They should be the same ohms.
Mine had a .6 ohm difference on the green
Follow up FYI - reversing the leads going into the first receptacle, solved the problem in it and the other receptacles down the chain. I don’t know if the wires were installed that way at the factory or were changed at some point. Everything looked original.
Another point to be made is that my Klein RT210 circuit tester gave an erroneous reading on one of the outlets. This was confirmed with multitester readings. Don’t know why.
Ken Julian “Blue Note” NS26C#9 Kingsville, ON.
What was the reading? There’s usually an error chart on those testers that helps troubleshoot the problem. You may need to pull the offending outlet and check its wiring. Or there could be a wiring error in the preceding box where the connection was made to feed this outlet. Household outlets are designed for solid copper wire and boat wiring is stranded, so things can work loose if not properly installed. Wire nuts are not allowed on boats, but Wago connectors are. The good thing is that it’s probably an easy fix.
Brian, it was the #2 receptable in the chain, and oddly, the reading was the “CORRECT” one on the bottom, but logically it should have read HOT/NEU REV like the #1 & #3 outlets, since the polarity was reversed on the first one and the rest were daisy chained together. Anyway, when I reversed the leads on the first receptacle, all the readings were “CORRECT”. I did pull the outlet and the wires were all solid copper and the connections were good. Doesn’t make sense, but there it is.
Solid copper wires? This is dangerous and taboo on a boat. It looks like a previous owner added this circuit without understanding the rules. I hate to say it, but you should replace any solid copper cables with tinned, stranded copper boat cabling. Read up on it first, so nobody will be finding your goofs in the future. AC isn’t magic, or terribly complex, but it can kill you or start a fire if you get it wrong.
Corrosion on the wires will cause faulty readings.. solid wire in tinned is not permitted on a boat due to vibration and corrosion issues
After doing some reading, I found out that standard house type 14 gauge copper wire was commonly installed on boats in the 70’s and 80’s. It looks to me like this was an original factory install.
It isn’t the standard now, and likely has caused some incidents in the past, but in most cases has held up fairly well.
I don’t trust it, though, and will replace the whole system if I decide to use AC.
Ken Julian
AC power on recreational boats was pretty uncommon before the '70s so I guess they needed to learn the hard way.
My AC was done at the factory in 83 and is stranded boat cable. I did change the outlets to GFI
AC outlets are actually not easy to wire wrong. The hot wire goes to the brass screw (with a lug or fork terminal on tinned marine wire) and the neutral goes to the silver screw. They are also stamped with words like load or hot on the brass side and neutral or neu on the silver side.
The safety ground of course goes on the green screw.
Just sayin’…
Paul, with my 45 year old outlets, both terminals looked like brass, no silver. Maybe this was due to oxidation or they were just made that way. Also, there was no visible labelling of the hot and neutral sides. There was a wide and narrow slot though.
The two different sized slots are important. The narrow one is hot, the wider one is common (or neutral. )
There is also a ground hole beneath the two slots?
I can’t remember seeing AC receptacles without brass / silver coding but I confess I haven’t often even looked for the labeling. A quick Google indicates that long and short slots and brass / silver coding started showing up in the 50s and became code (presumably USA)in 1962.
Yes, there are ground holes at the bottom.
I don’t know if it was the factory or a previous owner, but someone put the hot wire coming out of the breaker into the wide (neutral) slot on the first receptacle. When I reversed that, the polarities were all correct.
So I’m moving on from my questionable AC system.
Thanks for all the input!
