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Education Programs

Advanced Electrical Troubleshooting

The ABYC Advanced Electrical Troubleshooting one day course will familiarize the experienced marine electrician with the most modern troubleshooting techniques and test equipment available to our industry. This course is especially relevant as we see more electrical and electronic equipment being integrated on board modern boats. This course will teach the participant how to use equipment that although not necessarily new (many of the covered techniques have been widely used in the computer/telecommunications industry for years) to the electrical/electronics world, has only recently become practical for use within our industry due to advances in computer chip technologies that have brought the equipment to within the financial reach of the marine technician.

The course will focus on eleven key topic areas and in each case explain the potential problems, how to use the appropriate test equipment, and possible solutions to each of the problem areas.

The morning session for this course will provide all of the background, application and limitations for the equipment mentioned and the afternoon session will consist of a hands-on live demonstration of each piece of gear and discussion of potential sources for the equipment.

Equipment to be discussed and demonstrated includes:

  1. Battery conductance tester to determine battery state of health and failure prediction.
  2. Using a tone generator to trace wiring runs.
  3. Using a time domain reflectometer (TDR) to pinpoint short circuits and open circuits.
  4. Thermal sensing with an infrared heat sensor.
  5. Power analysis, comparing voltage vs. current electrical wave forms to determine power factors.
  6. AC wave form analysis using an oscilloscope.
  7. Electronically tracking system operating parameters using a laptop computer and tracking software linked to an enabled DVOM to verify intermittent or cycling faults.
  8. Tracing and isolating Radio frequency interference (RFI).
  9. Using a gauss meter to determine electromagnetic interference levels.
  10. Measuring ground system impedance and testing for AC neutral to ground leakage, to ensure this vital safety system's integrity.
  11. Using a megohmmeter to test for insulation breakdown that can induce leakage into the AC grounding system.
Calendar of Events/Registration