Flybridge guages

[ColinK]

Hello,
I hope you all had a great season. Having survived my first year without sails there is no going back now ha ha. Wouldnt say unscathed but hey ho character building.
I wondered if there are any electrical techys out there ? There is just one thing that I worry about up on the fly bridge and that is not knowing what temperature the engines are running at. I have trim tabs,revs,etc up there but no temp guages.
Is it a matter of buying extra guages and running wires up from the existing ones in the saloon, running wires from the existing senders or a completly separate sender for them?
Any help appreciated.

Cheers, Colin.

[severn77]

Hi Colin

I've got the Sedan 36, with the same setup whereby no gauges for temp or oil pressure, which i find annoying not to have aswell. Why boatbuilders don't fit them as standard for the flybridge is beyond me.
From what i've researched, the original senders have to be changed for "dual senders" for both the temp and oil, then a case of running in the relevant cabling (unless your lucky and the wiring loom already has the cables in place).
An alternative i have fitted are exhaust temp alarms. Basically a temp sensor fitted to both exhaust elbows, with a readout display on the flybridge. The system i bought is in link below and i've been very pleased with it two seasons in. If you were to lose raw water cooling, this would show up almost immediately with this setup, whereby conventional temp gauge can demonstrate a delay before overheat is noted.

http://www.coolantalarm.co.uk/shop/inde ... oductId=30

[ColinK]

Hello,
Thanks for the link I had done a google search myself but not come up with anything. Looks just what I need and my wife has been asking me if I wanted anything for Christmas
Looks like it will also check one oil temp/pressure but its the engine temp that I like to keep an eye on so spot on thanks. Says it has some waterproofing too?

All the best, Colin.

[severn77]

Your welcome. Yes the casing is waterproof, but I've not really put that to the test as I made a small bracket and mounted it on the underside of fly dash area, near footwell if that makes sense, but the angle whereby it's mounted makes it easily viewable. It is a very simple system to install, can't remember if it came with 12v cig plug as power source, but I just cut that off and hard wired into boat with inline fuse and power on/off switch. To fit the temp sensors, I used a jubilee clip/clamp, the type made from a kit where you can make any size jubilee clamp you need (search eBay).
All I did do prior to purchase, was to confirm with supplier that the length of the supplied sensor leads would meet my requirement, which they did easily, but would be worth you doing a rough measure of where you'll route the sensor leads to make sure.

[ColinK]

Hello,
Thanks for the info yes I think I know where you mean we have a simular area on the Corniche that would be away from direct rain etc. I need about 7m of cable and I think that I read it came with 10m so fine.
Yes know the jubilee clips you mean I use them to fix chimney cowls to chimney pots (im a solid fuel engineer) so got plenty of them in shiney stainless!
I will show management the link just in case Santa would like to buy me one, Don't think that I will be doing any serious cruising this year now so time will be perfect.
Tomorrow I should have delivered courtesy of Mr ebay a new tap/shower unit to replace the original broken one that has given up the ghost. Even has the right tap hole spacings I hope!

Once again thanks for your help, Colin.

[superheat6k]

Hi Colin

On my Turbo 36 I installed a Noland engine data to NMEA2000 converter so I could view the gauge data on the FB on my Garmin plotter. These also showed the revs on two parallel bar graphs which made synchronising the engines simpler. The Garmin allowed alarms to be set to suit your requirements, e.g Low O/P or Hi Watertemp.

One Noland will do Revs plus Oil, Water and one other function for 2 engines. Not cheap though at around £250

I also fitted some exhaust monitors from EBAY for about £8 each, and wired the alarm circuit to the otherwise unused VP glow plug warning light at the lower helm, which is directly connected to the same on the upper helm. I set the alarm a few degrees above the warmest temp these measured, so the warning was nice and early.

Ebay link

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/10A-12V-Digit ... XQVERS4jEA

[MikeJ]

I had a raw water pump fail in September, and the first I knew on the flybridge was the coolant alarm going off. So this winter's project is to add repeating gauges on the flybridge too.

http://www.turbo36.net/images/temperature.jpg

I made an exhaust alarm out of a Raspberry PI and a couple of the sensors shown in Superheat6k's post (10 for £10 on ebay). My plan is to mux that out over NMEA into the chartplotter. For the rest of the gauges, I was just going to read the voltage off the back of the saloon gauges into the PI. Just need to package and install. I made it with a web front end (link above), so you can read off a phone/ipad if you want to. Where are people attaching the probes? To the water injection elbow or further down? What is a "normal" temperature?

If you just want analogue gauges, I don't see why you need dual sensors. They're basically just voltmeters, so with reasonable cables you can just install duplicate gauges on the flybridge and parallel them up, can't you?

Mike