Our first week back aboard the good ship Möbius after our 3 week fun packed time being Gramma and Grampa with our two Granddaughters Brynn (beside me in Red) and Blair beside Christine in Green. Their parents, Lia & Brian joined us as well of course and we are all still savoring the latest batch of memories we created during our time with them exploring Turkey.
I’ll let the photo and the smiles tell you all you need to know about what a great time we had.
If you’d like to see and know more, check out THIS post that Christine put up last week with a few more photos and explanations.
After that MUCH needed break, it was back to work for Christine and I this week and we were soon ramped right back up to our typically busy selves onboard, me getting back to the still growing list of jobs needing done to get Möbius seaworthy and Christine getting back to working on her next books.
And boy has it been HOT here in Finike!
Lest some of you should think, for reasons I can’t fathom, that I’m eXaggerating about the weather here, check out this snip I just grabbed from Accuweather.
See for yourself, daytime highs of 43C/110F and night time lows down to 22C/72F
Where is Möbius??
Speaking of Finike, some of you have asked about where we and Möbius are now located so here is a quick set of maps to show you,
All in all a very nice spot that will be Möbius’ Home Port for the rest of this year as we eXplore more of the beautiful Turkish Turquoise Coast.
The Whack-a-Molomino games begin!
I’ve created this portmanteau “Whack-a-Molomino” in an attempt to articulate how my week has been going as I find myself playing this new game that combines;
Read on and you will soon see what I mean.
Cooling Down Heats me up!
Let’s start with this riddle; “How can Air Conditioning heat you up?” The technically correct answer is that this is a feature of some AirCon systems which can run in what’s known as Reverse Cycle model which heats up the air going into the rooms instead of cooling it down. This is a very welcome feature in cold climates and the Webasto AirCon system in Möbius does indeed have this Reverse Cycle feature. However, this week it was a “bug” not a feature when things went pear shaped and the game of Whack-a-Molomino began while trying to get our AirCon system to cool down the cabins on Möbius in these very hot days and nights we’ve been having. Here’s how that went.
This chilled coolant is then pumped through well insulated plumbing to the small water to air heat exchangers (mini radiators) in each Air Handler with a thermostatically controlled fan that blows fresh cold air into each Cabin.
I was primarily anxious to get some real world data on the energy consumption of this AirCon system and as you might imagine, these hot days provided all the more incentive. So Monday morning I went through all the pre-start preparations for this brand new and new to me set of equipment and controls. After re-reading the Webasto product manuals, checking that all valves for sea water and coolant were open, all the 230V circuit breakers were on, the five MyTouch displays all came to life and were ready for testing. I started with the Guest Cabin aka Christine’s Office where she is anxiously awaiting cool calm place to work on her books. At first I had a problem getting the Chiller unit to go into Cooling mode but it was stuck on Heating mode, but I worked with the two head technicians from Webasto to both design this system and then when they were commissioning it and so I was able to get in touch with them on WhatsApp and they were very fast to respond and show me the “trick” to get into the second settings menu by holding down the main screen for 3 seconds which then gave me the option to change the mode from Heating to Cooling and set it to be Automatic in the future.
All was going well as the Chiller fired up, brought the water temps down from 32C/90F which believe it or not is the sea temperature here, to about 3-4C and then the Air Handler in Christine’s Office came on and had cold air blowing in which put an eXtremely big smile on my Captain’s face! As I scurried about setting up the other three air handlers, checking for and fixing the leaks I found, and keeping an eye on the Amps/Watts meters I started to notice the very unsettling odor of burning wires! Yikes!
Fortunately I had caught this early and there was no fire, just the unmistakable and unsettling smell of overheated insulation on electrical wires.
I quickly found the culprit when I burned my fingers on the wires jammed into terminal # 24 (Green arrow) and saw the melting plastic in the middle of that block which the Red arrow is pointing at.
I quickly and carefully pulled the sticky hot wire out of the the melting terminal and you can see the wire inside the White oval.
My ever so handy and well used Flir ONE Thermal camera plugs into the USB C of my Pixel 5 phone and displays the thermal images overlaid on top of the phones camera image where I can control the degree of transparency to see more or less of the thermal image vs the actual image by varying the degree of transparency.
I have this camera out at all times on passages and we use it on our hourly engine room and ship inspections to scan things like all the wiring panels, the Gardner and any other places where changes in temperature are not a good thing.
Not particularly cheap until you consider the consequences and expenses of NOT having one!
Wiring any boat can be challenging but on any metal boat boat and especially so an aluminium boat, this is eXtremely important as the consequences of incorrectly wired, especially AC and DC grounding wires range from accelerated corrosion from stray electrical currents to eXtremely rapid corrosion if current is traveling through the hull or other conductive components such as the prop shaft and propeller. For reasons that most of us AL boat owners can’t understand, this is an area that many professional and certified technicians seem to not understand and as a result many boats suffer unnecessary damage and shortened life spans.
It became worse as I tested and traced each of the existing wires and discovered that in several cases wires had be simply cut or disconnected in order to prevent things like the RCB safety circuit breakers from tripping. As I continued by drawing out a schematic of the current Main Panel, I discovered that the electrical diagrams I had been supplied with had not been kept up to date during the build process and given the importance of getting this right the best thing to do was to remove ALL the wiring and start over.
Here is the newly wired middle set of Gray Junction blocks with all the Black jumper wires you can see in the original photo up above now gone and proper DIN junction jumpers now in place where needed.
Tomorrow morning I will finish up by reconnecting indicator lights, tidying up all the wires and putting them neatly into the wire chases for added safety. I’ll try t show you that in next week’s update.
And thus ended round one of this week’s Olympic Whack-a-Molomino games. I’m not sure who “won” here other than Möbius being the winner of now being both a better and a more seaworthy boat that puts us one step closer to being able to head out to sea with the complete confidence that is mandatory for doing so, or is at least for Christine and myself.
I’ll be back with more next week as I hopefully get back to what I originally set out to do; get our AirCon system working!
Thanks for taking the time to join me for this week’s tournament and PLEASE do add your comments, questions and suggestions in the “Join the Discussion” box below.
Thanks!
Wayne
Hi Wayne, thanks the hot wire update… you didn’t mention the Turkey fires. Canada is doing the same right now.
Hey there Rick & Linda and thanks for this comment. As I will outline in the update tomorrow, I’ve got the AC “hot wire” situation under control now and all is working well. As for the fires here in Turkey we are fortunately quite well situated here in Finike with the large fires being several hundred miles to the East and West of us. We started seeing some traces of smoke in the air here on Thursday, with a slight haze in the air and much more Red in the sunrise which is a nice silver lining to the otherwise drastic situation these fires are causing. They are attributing our high temperatures to a “heat dome” which is the same situation that caused the really high temps for our family and friends in the PNW and BC a few weeks ago. As I noted in that monthly temperature table in last week’s posting, we had some eXtremely hot days and got up to 45 several times this past week as well. However it has now cooled down considerably to the mid 30’s so much easier to take. The humidity is up much more though with these lower temps but that may be a side effect of the smoke forming a bit of a sealing layer overtop of us?
Hope you are seeing cooler temps now or soon as well.
Wayne
This brings life to the term “shake down” cruise. The majority of owners don’t have the benefit of this kind of “educational” experience 0:)
No shortage of “teachable moments” that’s for sure John! I called my last boat “Learnativity” because learning is one of my great loves in life and I had coined that word many many moons ago and seemed to fit me and the boat well. No surprise to you I’m sure, she certainly lived up to her name over my 12 years sailing her around the world and I did give some thought to calling this new boat Learnativity II but we went with Möbius and that feels just right too.
Wayne
Shocking, this is a builder’s error. What’s more, who from the builder inspected it? Oh well, it’s a very good thing you caught this early in the game and are capable of correcting it.
Hi there Wade and Diane. As fellow long time liveaboards and having built your own boat as well, you know that problems are a fundamental part of boat ownership and what matters is as you say “caught early and are capable of correcting”. I’ll do a bit of an update on the wiring in my update tomorrow but I replaced all the AC wiring in the main AC control box and all is working fine now, as is the AirCon system which is what I set out to get up and running in the first place and then that turned into the not so fun game of Whack-a-Molomino!
Hope your temperatures are a bit lower like ours are the past few days and you are also enjoying your time cruising up the coast here a bit. Hope we will get to anchor with you before the season is over so let’s stay in touch and work on that as our times allow.
-Wayne
Not only Möbius won, you’re the winner, too, since you’re now master of your own wiring!
Yes indeed Philip, as you know well from your years on Blue Bie, investing in learning your boat pays very good dividends afterwards and I definitely know our AC wiring system much more intimately than ever!
I still don’t understand what the builder did not do the fix? Is there any warranty with these guys?