At the Zeisings – Exercising Hoolie

Hoolie's a blur of speed as he chases golf balls

When I started the Panda genset this morning to charge the batteries, the charger wouldn’t initialize. That means I had no AC power to the boat. At first I suspected the genset but when I checked its output, the AC line was live. After technical support calls to both Panda and Prosine (the charger/inverter) we finally determined that the problem was in genset since I could get the Prosine to work after turning on the airconditioning. Evidently, the air conditioner loaded the output of the genset enough to pull down the voltage into the acceptable range for initialization of the Prosine. In other words, the genset’s voltage was too high at start up for the Prosine to accept,.

Nice house in the woods on the ICW - great porch

So what to do? I could work around the problem by starting the air-conditioner each time I started the genset (and then turning off the air-conditioner after the water heater and charger are off and running). So it must be something in the voltage control box in the genset which Panda treats as a “black box”, meaning there’s no repair protocol – we’ll send you a new one (for a price). It’s probably just a sticky relay. I’ll fool around with it tomorrow some more but I’ll probably wind up getting a new control unit. Things are never dull on a boat.

Well, after all that fun, we enjoyed the warm, sunny day by playing bridge on the back porch overlooking the boats sailing by on the ICW.