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Batteries aren’t charging - alternator malfunction?


qwertyking

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All of a sudden yesterday, after my boat dove sideways into the lake on a faulty sun stream float lift, the batteries on my 2017 23 lsv won’t charge. Not sure if the incident on the lift and the alternator problem are related. 

Anybody know how to troubleshoot the alternator? I don’t even know where it is, haha. Pics? 

Lift and boat are out of commission on first day of Memorial Day weekend FML. 

 

Edited by qwertyking
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Boat ran and held a charge for a few hours Saturday before having the same problem as Friday. As soon as I ran it out of my home bay on plane in chop, the voltage drops below 10, errors beeping warnings, screens go dark, and I limp back to dock. Now to keep it running I have to have booster connected and on. Then I have 10 minutes of range.

Unhooked and sanded all battery connections. Alternator and belt look fine. No dice. Maybe it will magically work long enough to ride on Sunday like it did on Saturday. 

I spent bigs bucks to get nice stuff so it would work when needed and I could enjoy my precious time off. Both boat and lift take a sh!t one week into their second year. 

Maybe it got hit by lightning? 

Lift has a bad hydraulic line and is leaking fluid. 3.5 week wait for service on that.

Starting to wonder if it’s worth it all. 

 

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Oh and I don’t have onboard charger. Have carryon charger and booster to get it started. 

Never had issues like this before. 

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Have you checked ground wires? Something like that sounds like its very possible you have a loose ground, or corrosion on the ground connections. I would clean and tighten all ground wires. You can use a voltmeter to see if/where voltage is dropping. (especially seems to point toward loose connection if it happened when you hit chop)

Other thing...are you sure the batteries are good? If its a 2014, very possible that battery is going bad. You could check fuel cells and top off with distilled water, but likely better to just buy new battery if its going out on you. Wet cell batteries dont typically last more than couple years on a boat unless you have them on maintainer anytime boat is not in use, you keep the cells topped off and the level of juice high. They last a lot longer when you keep them topped off compared to allowing them to drop a lot and leaving them like that for a while before re-charging. Anyway, its another possibility.

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7 hours ago, qwertyking said:

Oh and I don’t have onboard charger. Have carryon charger and booster to get it started. 

Never had issues like this before. 

Also, make sure you have a marine charger/maintainer that is "smart"...over charging the batteries will also shorten the life. I also have carry-on maintainers and hook them up whenever the boat is not in use. I also added a 3rd battery so I have 2 batteries dedicated to accessories/stereo/etc.....1 for starting of course.

On your switch, are you running it on 1 so starting battery stays isolated, or on "combine". When on combine (and this depends of course on the switch you have), it draws from both batteries and does not protect your starter battery.

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3 hours ago, Infinitysurf said:

Also, make sure you have a marine charger/maintainer that is "smart"...over charging the batteries will also shorten the life. 

Do they even make chargers that don't have overcharge protection built in? 

It seems like I haven't seen one of those in at least 10-15 years, but maybe it is because I always am looking at chargers that get recommended on here.  

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48 minutes ago, TallRedRider said:

Do they even make chargers that don't have overcharge protection built in? 

It seems like I haven't seen one of those in at least 10-15 years, but maybe it is because I always am looking at chargers that get recommended on here.  

Tons of constant chargers out there. Cheap basic "tender" will, along with large shop charger are even the smaller bench-top hobby chargers. If it doe snot clearly state multi-stage or similar, then it could just keep plugging away. 

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1 hour ago, TallRedRider said:

Do they even make chargers that don't have overcharge protection built in? 

It seems like I haven't seen one of those in at least 10-15 years, but maybe it is because I always am looking at chargers that get recommended on here.  

You might be right, even Harbor Freight's cheap "manual" charger drops into trickle mode.

https://www.harborfreight.com/26-Amp-612V-Manual-Charger-60322.html

 

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