Feeling overloaded?

[J's Dream]

Take a look at the pic again...

On the 50A plug, it looks like there is a price you'd likely see at a marine flea market, or surplus store. Does it say $5.00?

I guess this is what happens when you don't spend $90 on a new end!

[Pascal]

i think you guys are quick to judge. if the dockside breaker works, you can't pull more than 30amp from a 30amp breaker which seems to be the culprit here.

but it is a good idea to inspect the plugs on a regular basis, looking for corrosion or discoloration, as wet as feeling the plugs under load for heat.

[thoward]

To be honest I think the 50A cord is a 30A. It is much smaller than my 50A cord. The 30A cord was small too. My guess was the 30A had too small a cord with too long a run and too much draw. Heck I am just glad they got it before it got out of control. If you look in the background my Whaler is right there. I actually feel bad for the guy as this happened on his 1st day of ownership. I am sure he bought it that way.....

[Trojan]

You can't judge the cable size by its outside cover. Only heat from a poor connection can cause this. Even if the breaker was a 50 amp breaker with a 30 amp cord it still was a bad connection. I doubt the breakers were wrong. I would bet the female receptacle in the tower was warn out and needed replacing. Unless the cable end had been bad and had been replaced incorrectly. It also could be from broken strands at the plug from being jerked on from an improper boat tie up. Only a bad connection will cause heat........

BILL

[Pascal]

somethign that just occured to me..

this boat was connected with both a 30amp and 50 amp cords, right ?

what happens if the neutral connector on the 220/50 cord gets doesn't connect ? you suddenly have 130amp neutral/return going thru a 30amp cord and outlet...

ideally, neutral circuits should be separated but in some cases they're not. I don't know about new boats but i know that when i installed my inverter i had to manually ID and split all the neutrals that were originally on the same neutral bus.

does it make sense ? i don't think the 220/50 breaker will pop on loss of neutral.

[Trojan]

Neutral is neutral It would do nothing.

BILL

[TedZ]

Been watching this for awhile.

One thing for sure is the load in the boat did not cause this or the breaker would have tripped. So something got hot and didn't draw enough to trip the 200, 300 or 400 amp NON-GROUND FAULT breaker supplying the dock.

It is hard to say what burned first, but the only thing that makes sense to me is a bad connection in the box that caused thermal runaway once the normal boat load was connected. Another words the box burned the cord in my theory.

My $.02

Ted