Thumbs Up For Customer Services

First here's the roof with the tape removed and the surplus grit swept off.  The weather didn't behave so it still needs painting. Oh well next time.

The photo of the mushroom vent surrounds wasn't very good on the last blog so I took some in daylight.

So on to customer services.

I've been having a few teething troubles now the boat is being used in the real world.  First the Central Heating boiler has been problematic for a while now.  It failed last week and gave the error code for a faulty thermistor.  I was kinda pleased that something had been signalled.  A phone call to Mikuni and as usual their first class customer service had one send out FOC for replacement.  It's my guess / hope this has been the problem all along and the unit will perform as it should for years to come.

The other issue that came to the fore was the generator & inverter charger not being happy with each other.  Sometimes the charger would charge other time it wouldn't until this week it just wouldn't even try.  Also when the electric oven was on with the generator running last week and the charger on the charger would drop in and out which is not right, the generator should make up the load but the Victron controls all mains coming in so it has to be set right.

A call to Victron in Holland to discuss it with service / support started on a trail of investigation.  First I had to plug it in to shore power to see if it would charge on shore power.  Sure enough it did.

When I bought the inverter kit I decided to get the PC interface so the parameters of the Victron could be read and reset and altered without using the fiddily dip switch option.  The software and drivers were downloaded from Victron then another call to Victron and I was talked through some alterations to the default settings and hey presto everything is talking and working together. Thaks very much to customer support at Victron.

Here's a couple of screen shots of the control.  The data displays in real time.

These 2 panels show input voltage which in this case is the generator, the amps being drawn in this case by the charger, the charge voltage, chargeing amperage, the mains frequency and the mains ripple, or how clean the supply is.

There's a whole load of other information which to be honest I have no idea about, but I think on balance the PC interface was well worth the money as I will use it to monitor things in future.  I'm so impressed I have ordered the PC interface that goes into the battery monitor which can store nearly a months worth of data on what the batteries have been going through.