Saturday 2 Oct, re-launch 2021, HHN day 3: All day troubleshooting and changing Empirbus CLC nodes for new ones.
Due to jet lag, we are both wide awake by 4:30am. So we decide to get up even though it’s totally dark outside. The lag will work itself out of us over the coming days, hopefully.
Today is day 2 of fixing what wasn’t supposed to be broken: the damned Empirbus! Despite it being a Saturday, I tried to call the Swedish support desk to check I was doing the right procedure to troubleshoot. They had told me yesterday that they are available 7 days a week. But I should have guessed: my call was greeted with an automatic message saying the help desk is only open Monday to Friday. I had a feeling I wouldn’t find any Swedish working on a weekend!
My fall-back was a call to the UK, to a contact that a fellow HR owner had given me. The manager of Atlantis Marine, who is apparently extremely knowledgeable with Empirbus. Mark answered the phone instantly and happily spoke at length to me, despite it being the weekend, and despite there being no commercial reason to help me. Don’t you just love this type of guys – they will always get my business ahead of others.
Mark said he only knew of one other total system failure, like the one I described. And that had been due to a nearby lightening strike. Funnily, he said the Empirbus had been likened to “the most expensive fuse that money can buy”. Saying that while the system is generally very reliable, if the boat gets hit by lightning the system will get destroyed while it protects all circuits and equipment attached to it! So maybe this is the answer. A nearby lightning strike? Near enough to give the boat a hefty electromagnetic pulse, but not near enough to actually burn things. Ray tells us it has been an unusual summer for rain and electric storms, so it could indeed be the cause of our problems. And certainly, it explains why so many of the units suddenly have problems.
Whatever the cause, it’s quite daunting to fix. For each and every unit, even basic resistance measurements don’t pass the threshold test. So, I go about changing them all. But I do feel very lucky we have spare units on board. Otherwise, this could have been a very expensive exercise at $1,500 each unit!
Gradually, I manage to get each one replaced and working. But for several it becomes an iterative task, trying several units before one would at last talk to the others and allow me to reprogram it. Something interesting happened while doing this, that was also quite alarming. Before programming the boat’s system into a new unit, it is anybody’s guess what default program that unit has installed. Having just installed one particularly new unit, but not yet programmed it, I tried a cabin light switch, and the bow thruster came on! Another time I tried the anchor light, and the saloon lights came on! Spooky!
By the end of the day, I was down to one last unit (out of total 7) that needed fixed, with 6 now working OK. But no matter what unit I put in its place, this last node would simply not work, damn it! Luckily there are no real important circuits on that one, so we will live with it till Monday, when I will have a call to Sweden, the manufacturers. More importantly for now, the shower works as well as the shower drain pump. So we get ourselves clean tonight!
Meanwhile, during the day while I was mumbling around in frustration, Oana was very busy with our vast medical supplies, sorting out all-out-of-date creams, pills and potions, then setting about the same in the food cupboards. Big job, but great to have a clear out ready for the next provisioning.
We also took the bikes out ready for transport to the bathrooms. But found 2 of the tyres would not inflate. The extreme heat on the boat over the summer really does eat into some materials. So a pair of bike tyres go on the Amazon list-to-buy. Let the annual Cloudy Bay Amazon-ing begin!
