15KW Westerbeke Gen issue

Down the St Johns river a few years ago, our gen-set picked up some water lily leaves and shut down. I have aways remembered that and can apply it to your gen-set fault; A piece of trash gets picked up, blocks the pickup, gen-set shuts down, debris floats away and never seen, gen-set cranks back up and problem never returns. Could it be that simple? Shaking DCv meters, talks about batteries and chargers could be for not?

Skip, The only thing you may be able to do is what you have done (I think), check and clean all connects and keep a log. Be quick with that new IR gun you have and shoot everything when (if) it shuts down again. When you restart, observe the run solenoid if it moves all the way back to the run position.

On your next raw pump service, pop the end cap off the H/E toward the pump and make sure it's clear.

Good luck and let us know if you find anything.

,Ralph

Wow

OWO, The read I get, Both mains and gen-set run from the same (smaller) bank. Stb main has two alternators to charge the house and starting bank. Port main and gen-set also charges the same starting bank.
Windlass runs from the starting bank also. There is a parallel solenoid for the only two banks. Some other notes are fuzzy when I expand the schematic.

Question one; What drugs were involved when this was designed?
Two; Do you have any room for another set of batteries?
Three; Would you like to improve this design? Remember q 2.

Ya know, This does reinforce our thoughts; Batteries were not low to shut down the gen-set.

There's a Cabo down the dock and they reported on their weekend outing a very similar situation.
This is all second hand info.

Apparently they were drift fishing for awhile with gen on, went to start the stbd engine and the gen died.
Back at the dock they tried to re-create the event and it wasn't until after 6-7 attempts that they were able.
They saw the bank voltage drop into the low teens while the engine cranked. Batteries were load tested and passed.

Pretty sure that they have a Northern Lights set-up, but it sounded like deja-vu.
I'll try to learn more and see if it might be related to your situation.

This is pretty common when a main and genset share the same battery bank! Crank the main and the voltage drop can be enough to kill the genset

Pretty common on smaller baysilcarvrays, totally unacceptable on a Cabo!!!

IMO the battery sizes on some of the Cabo's are a little light for the engines that are installed in some cases. For example the 45' Was origionally designed for 3196s when it was first introduced, towards the end it could be had with C18 or Man 1100's and with all of the electronics on the engine and such the batteries did not have an excessive amount of reserve power. But the battery compartment was part of the engine room inner liner. On the 45' I ran, we did not have shorepower where the boat was docked, so I would start the gen about every 2 weeks, run the battery charger for a while, and then start the mains, sometimes the bank would still be low and cause the gen to stall.

Sounds like the battery charger is not working properly if the generator was running while they were fishing, the engine bank should have been fully charged with the charger on.