Boat Wiring

Hello guys, back in May my buddy and I bought an old 1972 SkeeterHawk Bass Boat. The previous owner had ran out of gas and the wind had taken them across a rocky bank, putting two cracks in the hull. The guy ripped the floor up with intentions of fixing the cracks and replacing the floor but didn’t. So for $900 we had a working motor with controls and a project boat. We are to the final stages of the project and wiring is coming up here really soon. We will be running one 12V battery to the 28 HP Johnson and don’t plan on running more than probably 5 accessories. We know that it can’t be too tricky seeing the very few amount of wires that were actually ran before. We’ve just never done anything with wiring of a boat. If anyone could come up with a wiring diagram that would depict where we need to run wires, that would help us out tremendously.

Attachments:

1. 

   3C706D16-1DC1-4FA3-B16B-95F69950FE9F.jpeg
   

2. 

   3435F5AB-6DAB-46B8-84F5-A9FE187F61FE.jpeg
   

I recommend that you get a BlueSea fuse block. Put your accessories on the spade type breakers. The battery would only have motor cables and jumpers to the fuse block. Bilge and onboard charger are also possible direct wire to battery. Everything else I like on a fuse block.

I would say run a thicker guage wire like a 14/2 from your battery to a centralized fuse panel/block then just run an 18/2 to each accessory. easy peasy! going to need to wire your lights together, then your bilge, livewell and any other accesories. use a volt meter to check your connections and use quality marine connectors.

My boat had 14 gauge from battery to fuse block I ended up going to 10 gauge and that cleared up a lot of problems. Mya graphs used to shut off when starting motor they do not anymore it was amazing how hot that 14 gauge got.

Check out tiny boat nation. That guy has tons of videos that will help

IK can’t draw a diagram because we don’t know what electronic devices you intend to run.

+1 on SuperDave’s recommendation of BlueSea.

I’ve done the fuse block and then a separate switch bank, but now BlueSea offers combined switch blocks with fuse or breaker banks all in one unit.

If I had to do boat rewire now, I’d use one of the combined switch/breaker panels. It is nice to have a switch for every major device, even if it has its own “on” button. That way when you leave the boat, you kill all electronics just by making sure every switch on the panel is off.

Be sure the wire leads from the battery to the panel is sized properly so it can support your maximum anticipated load.

A few more tips.

1. Undersized wire is a MAJOR issue in boat electronics. DC current is highly impacted by the length of the wire run. Use an online calculator to calculate proper size for every run you need to make.

Livewell and bilge pumps especially are huge power hogs and will not work to maximum effectiveness unless wire is properly sized. I have seen bilge pumps that pumped to less than 25% of rated capacity because of undersized wire.

2. Use waterproof heat shrink connectors for all connections.

3. Don’t put any splices in the middle of wire runs. Buy enough wire to make full end to end runs with no splices.

4. Protect wire with grommets whenever it passes through a hole drilled in metal.

5. Oversize your switch panel so you have extra switches available for future additions.

Grouse

I use at least 8 ga. for my battery to fuse block jumpers. That will handle at least 50 amps.

foulpole18 wrote:

Check out tiny boat nation. That guy has tons of videos that will help

x2
Good luck. Looks like you have a great start. If you list everything you are going to wire in we can give you some more advice.