It's 1:15 AM, Do You Know Where Your Power's Coming From?

Like anything, marina life has its challenges.  Some are easily overcome, while others are completely out of our control.  The means by which we obtain electricity is one of those things that is completely out of our control.

We’ve been living aboard in our current Marina off and on for about 5 years, many more than we ever intended but that’s another story.  Our current and hopefully last stint began last October.  In that time we have had several power outages, brownouts and other fun power anomalies that had our lights, panels and inverter jumping.  So this morning at 1:15 am (of course it was 1:15AM, this stuff doesn’t happen in the afternoon) I awoke to the sound of the microwave resetting itself every 45 seconds or so.  It was also 85 degrees out and the air conditioner was not running.

I woke Mark to get his help with the problem.  We spent several minutes determining that the power coming into the boat was intermittent at best and the inverter was cycling on and off, hence the microwave reset.   We checked all of our breakers and other systems and everything looked good so we called the Marina.  Now every time we have called in the past we have been informed that the problem was on our end, even the time the entire Marina lost 1 of the 3 phases and they had Marina wide failures.  It was never on our end.  

After moving the boat to plug into a new power post we still didn't have power, yep it’s the boat have a good night.  Fortunately we had the generator working and were able to crank her up and run all of the systems including the air.  I know we could have opened the hatches but man is it hot and humid here.  Why be uncomfortable if it’s not necessary? 

This morning more investigation was in order.  Mark pulled the wires coming into the boat, which we had done last night but only one of the two and that one didn't have a problem.  The inspection went a little differently today. 

The end of the cord and the 30 amp inlet were completely burned up.  We are so lucky that we didn't have a fire!  I don’t know if this happened because of all of the junky power we’ve been getting from the Marina, but both the cable and inlet were only 4 years old.  I would think that they would last longer. 

In the do we stay in Corpus or do we go decision this one is definitely on the go side!