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hi everyone jeff cote here with boatingtechtalk.com and we have a question from a fellow boarder ed asks jeff what mistakes have you made wiring your own boat so that everyone else can learn oh wow i like it i mean i could talk about my boat it's sort of i don't have children i could talk about my boat forever so for those of you that care to listen and thank you here goes first thing i would say planning i think at the beginning i was a little bit too gun ho to doing and i thought that i could never forget anything i had ever done on my boat and that i would remember everything i did so planning and documenting is probably the biggest fault i did on my own boat i thought that someone could never forget anything they did on their own boat i was thinking it's too exciting how could i ever forget anything now i've had my boat for 15 years and i've forgotten and so i would say yeah documentation diagram sketches labeling all that stuff is super essential and maybe today you thinks that tomorrow you won't forget but i did and my boat it's a love affair absolutely love affair not near unconditional love and yet i forgot so that's something that i would remind younger me to spare older me the pain of having to figure out what i did and that's in labeling and also doing really good documentation so that's one thing the planning why i said planning at the beginning is because at the time i think i was always more thinking in terms of what i need to do this season what am i going to do you know short term not like tomorrow or today but this season or a year or two and i think with hindsight there's a lot of things i did that had to be redone or for example going through bulkheads where i would do a one-inch cutout and then eventually i had to do another one-inch cutout and then i had to find another hole and eventually i had all these different bulkheads holes and realistically if i had done a three-inch one and why didn't i you know like why spare it there was room now i've got multiple holes sometimes that gets tricky sometimes you can't do another hole somewhere else you got to remove the wiring from the existing hole drill another hole and they might be side by side like two holes that sort of overlap but it's not great so i think that would have been a big thing is really start imagining where you're gonna go with this boat and be honest with yourself and when it comes to wire routing just make sure that you actually create openings so that you won't have to do multiple holes to actually do everything because at the end of the day you know drilling multiple times is counterproductive so all right so planning and labeling would have been the first two other ones that i did and i remember this to the day i remember prior to having this business being a boat owner like being completely overwhelmed it was sort of like the biggest life challenge i'd ever faced up to that point it was unbelievably incredibly humbling and i remember i was tackling my windlass wiring and i came out from a chandlery and i they had sold me two hot wiring so two hot wiring positive and negative went on board installed it did the windlass and one day i'm doing the connections at the windlass on the solenoid and i'm noticing that the lug fits differently and i'm like why would a two watt lock fit differently on a two watt cabling and another two watt cabling at the channel i had been sold to op cabling but i had been giving a one out black and a two watt red so i ran one out on my boat having to redo it was a huge pain it was painful so what i learned is don't assume anything before you're going to do something really long the other thing i've done wrong is also for let's say enemy 2000 getting the wrong polarity thinking a cable is a cable not understanding and there's a male side and a female side and if you're running cabling from a's of bs on a boat the polarity of the connectors is really important because you don't want you can't connect two males together now of course there's couplers yes of course you can cut the wiring yes of course you can do all that stuff but the reality is maybe i didn't have to so if you're running electronics make sure the ends of the cables you know i had assumed that both ends are the same wouldn't it be easier you know and then you just have connection points but no it's male to female male to female the other one too is probably fusing i would say in hindsight i started with glass and i went mix i did glass fusing blade fusing of course the big stuff i do you know class t's you do a l you do um yes but at the beginning i didn't choose a standard you know i had glass fuses and i had blade fuses and in hindsight i wish i sort of stuck to one and realistically as i get older i wish younger me would have chosen blade fuses blade fuses are coded you know every color has a rating you don't have to read the labeling on the side of the glass fuse glass fuses break i've been cut by them before so i would have avoided glass fuses on my boat in hindsight now as i install stuff i remove everything and i go to blade fuses because again it's color coordinated i don't have to read a label i don't have to it's harder to see if the fuse is blown the other thing too that i would have wish i did is when it comes to fusing install fuse blocks right and i was a little silly you know i would have fused blocks that were at four or five and i would buy a six gang fuse block thinking oh i'm gonna use oh i have one or two spare i should have never done that that was a waste i should have gone if i need 4 put a 12 in sure enough how many times did i end up changing a 6 for 12 all the time or have 2 6's instead of 112. so you see i was always thinking about the scale too immediate to today not going and sort of now what i realize is look forward look way beyond the season and the change the cost is limited right think about when you're running cables between a and b's on boat and sometimes that's really painful think about what you're going to do next season so things i regret again is planning i know i'm going to be doing that maybe run the wiring but don't do the terminations right because the pain is in running the wires a lot of times so pre-run wires for yourself so that you don't have to run the wire twice so pre-running wires is something i'm a big advocate in i certainly do that on my boat i always think about okay maybe not this season next season but hey if i'm going to run the wire i might as well run whatever i need for the following seasons and then it becomes just buying the equipment and or doing terminations and um probably making sure always always always and i'm a big advocate of this having all the wire color coded at the beginning i have to admit you know when i started boating you know i was told you don't need to worry about red and black just buy black and put heat shrink connectors red where it's red and put yellow ones or black ones when it's black i shouldn't have done that i ended up changing all that i wasn't comfortable with that now it's a you know it's a personal decision but given a choice it's a little bit more expensive of course to buy two reels of something right now you've got to buy a reel for red and a real for yellow but in hindsight i wish that i didn't just buy a black reel of cabling and then cut it and then put heat shrink on it i've seen some failures there and again some people do it it's fine it's a choice right but i wish that i hadn't done that to myself and then um probably putting corrosion block like a bow shield t9 on connections that are in lazarettes or at the after the boat and being more careful with drip loops uh and condensation condensation it's surprising where that happens and especially if you don't have drip loops you know the condensation might actually end up following the wire right to the terminal blocks and all your terminal blocks have to be tinned they have to they just have to don't do anything that's untimed it's a waste of time and all your connections um you know when possible again always with heat shrink i don't regret that you know there's some connections i did to myself and i thank myself it's 15 years back it's really it's a conversation you have with yourself you know it's about past you to current you and you're like oh my god thank god you did that so that's one where i really joined the bandwagon really early about actually doing connections properly and so that i'm not going to be encountering corrosion the other thing too that i never did which but some people do never ever buy welding wire now of course listen if you can't afford go boating get welding wire don't stop yourself from boating because you can't afford the expensive stuff do what you have to to get on the water and i get that and i'm a big ad as long as it's safe but given a choice if you have the money i would recommend actually buying tinned wire for your boat not welding wire that is just copper and that many boat builders in the past used and many trade people still use sadly it's common i understand it's a budget thing right but you know if you can afford it you'll thank yourself later and that would be an investment so those are top of the head like just right off the head what did i think about read the question here was my answer unscripted here's what i would do again if i was going to do my boat on the wiring so thanks for asking this question and thanks for all of you for your listen if you haven't please subscribe that's how we know you're listening and we love producing content for all of you so thanks again for watching if you're curious we've written whole articles about this go on our website search it out and we've got a lot of other tech talks about this very topic if you haven't subscribed to this channel please do it actually it really does make a difference it encourages us to keep posting so if you're watching this video and haven't had a chance to subscribe we really do care because the more of you that are watching the more of us over here are willing to put spend more time in creating content so thanks again