The Harbor Queen

If you've read your way through this blog starting with the earliest post, you'll recall that our Freedom 25 inverter/charger smoked and sparked itself to death four months after we took formal delivery of the yacht (see: Mean Time Between Failure, September 1, 2002). Carver replaced it within a few days, under warranty. Well, it – that is, the "new" replacement unit – also croaked. Time in service – 24 months. At about $1,400 for one of these babies, that makes the privilege of keeping ones batteries charged nearly $60/month. We were beginning to think that Xantrex, the manufacturer, had designed a faulty product. We were wrong. The fault was Carver's.

The dead giveaway was a suspicious coating of salt in the engine room – of all places – covering the electrical bulkhead where the Freedom 25 was mounted, as well as the inside of the hull, and all nearby exhaust hoses.

Another not-so-subtle clue was the simultaneous meltdown of two plastic connectors in the 120 VAC service to the aft stateroom air conditioner. These connectors were cable-tied to the same bulkhead as the dead charger, a few inches outboard of it.

Now, you have to understand that the engine room on a 506 is about a half mile from the outside world, through 3 different entrances, and deep amidships, below the saloon. So, residue from apparent salt spray inside this cloistered space is, in a word, troubling.

Grabbing a neighbor and a garden hose, I ran a simulation of "being at sea" – a common experience for a boat, especially one this size. Sure enough, when the hose was directed towards the hull and its sizeable engine room vents, water flooded, I repeat, flooded into the engine room, and sprayed on the electrical bulkhead. Suddenly, past failures of the charger came into focus, and future failures became inevitable. Finally, a teardown of the newer charger proved the point: its circuit board had been shorted with salt water.

Now, designing marine ventilation systems that admit air but not water is not high art, as anyone who has ever looked inside a Dorade "box" will testify. But apparently, the need never occurred to Carver, or the yacht was only designed for "fair winds and following seas." We, however, were left with a yacht that was revealed, in effect, as an expensive harbor queen. Unless we were willing the fry the charger from time to time.

I quickly sent Carver a detailed failure analysis, including diagrams and photographs, (some of which are reproduced here), asking once again for warranty replacement of the charger, and insisted upon a permanent design solution and retrofit of the engine room vents to eliminate this major flaw in the yacht.



Carver again provided me a new Freedom 25 (lucky, since Xantrex refused to cover saltwater damage), provided replacement connectors for the ones that melted, and underwrote the yard bill. But the important part – fixing the problem once and for all – they never did...in spite of promises to the contrary.

At the time of our initial complaint, Kelly Kraning of Carver technical support informed me via email that he had forwarded my written report and photographs to engineering for a permanent solution. He also asked for our temporary indulgence, as "everybody was tied up" through the Miami boat show (mid February, 2005), but that a solution would be forthcoming after the show. Additionally, he admitted that ours was not the first complaint of this sort, that a fix had been implemented for "a 506 in Texas", and that he'd send us the appropriate drawings.

In spite of subsequent follow-ups by us with Kelly, we have yet to receive any fix – either from Carver engineering – or copies of the Texas boat's workaround. It's now been over a year. Carver has completely reneged on their commitment to provide a solution. And Kelly – he has since been promoted to Customer Relations Manager for Carver's new, ultra-luxury Marquis line. We hope for his sake that whomever designed our engine room vents was not allowed near the Marquis. Otherwise, Carver will have created even more expensive – albeit with Italian styling – harbor queens.

Engine room vent design: "D"; Follow-up support: "F".