Once all the wire and cable was run, I turned my attention to making all of the necessary connections.This is by far the longest and most tedious aspect of a wiring project. For each connection I had to strip the end of the wire, insert the wire into the correct terminal, crimp the terminal, heat shrink the connection, and screw the terminal to the appropriate buss bar, terminal strip, or breaker.

Subpanel connections

The wiring from the accessory subpanel was all cut short—just long enough to pass through a bulkhead in the galley and reach a set of terminal blocks. There are two terminal blocks to support all the wiring which leads from the accessory panel.

First is a 6-gang strip to terminate the power feeds and grounds for the inverter, stereo, 12-volt outlet, and a cabin light. The grounds were all ganged together onto one terminal. The inverter, stereo, and 12-volt outlet each got their own terminal, however the three terminals were bridged together so they could be fed from a single power lead from the main panel. The cabin light got its own terminal as it was fed from a separate breaker.

Additionally, there is an 8-gang strip which terminates the 8 leads for the speakers—2 front and 2 rear—from the stereo. While we only use the two front speakers currently, I wanted to have the option to easily add a second set later if desired.

Main Panel

This same philosophy carried over to the wiring of the main panel. I built a mahogany frame with a hinged front into which I installed the starting battery switch, the main DC breaker, the bilge pump switch, the 8 breaker distribution panel, and the remote panel for the Pathmaker battery combiner. Additionally, I mounted a large buss bar for the negative distribution, two 10-gang terminal strips, a 4-circuit common hot feed AGC fuse block, and a 4-circuit AGC fuse block with individual hot feeds for each circuit.

The first step in wiring the panel was to run a single hot lead from each breaker in the distribution panel to the appropriate spot on the terminal blocks. Where a breaker was to feed more than a single load—such as the cabin lights—I used terminal jumpers to bridge the requisite number of circuits on the terminal strip. In this way, the wiring that led from the distribtion panel was minimized, and more neatly organized.

The next step was to wire the postive leads for each load to the appropriate terminal strip. I was careful to keep things neatly labeled to minimize errors, and to facilitate troubleshooting or expansion in the future. Some items, such as instruments, the anchor light, and the VHF required fuses, so I wired short jumpers to the appropriate fuse blocks, then attached the positve leads to the fuse blocks. I used the common hot feed fuse block for the sailing instruments and GPS, which were wired to the same distribution breaker. For loads that were on individual breakers, I used the other fuse block.

Once the positives were wired up, I turned my attention to the negatives. I ran all negative leads to a single Cole-Hersee buss bar. I carefully labeled each negative with a fine-point Sharpie marker and grouped them in a logical way.

Finally I made the battery cable connections as necessary for the battery switch, DC main and distribution panel, and the negative bus bar.

Starting Battery Area

The dedicated cranking battery was housed under the galley unit on the starboard side of the boat. In this area I had installed not only the battery, but also the Pathmaker and a negative distribution post for the battery cable returns. The connections to be made in this are were minimal: gather the battery negatives and the negative from the Pathmaker at the distribution post; connect the Pathmaker remote cable; and connect the hot feeds from the two batteries to the Pathmaker solenoid posts.

Once this was finished, all that remained was to test they system. Initial tests on the hard indicate that everything is working as anticipated. Look for more details after launch in mid May of 2004.