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hey guys welcome to boating Tech talk and today we have Brian who has sent through some photos and wanted to pass along a message to other voters about an experience he had this winter after a recent snowfall he discovered that the power cord on his boat had almost caught fire and started melting at the boat even though nothing had tripped or caused any malfunctions on the show Power side or on his boat uh what was happening is he was drawing 45 amps to run heaters to make sure nothing was freezing on board and even though it was rated to a 50 amp cable it still appears that we had a massive amount of resistance in the circuit and it's caused the cable and the inlet to get quite hot now unfortunately this is fairly common and we see it quite a lot with Factory plugs uh have maybe been on the boat for 20 30 40 years who knows and what's happened over time is the PIN hands are starting to wear down they're not making as much contact when you actually plug in your short receptacle or maybe they're starting to get a little bit corroded and once we get that happening we get that buildup of resistance which causes causes lots of heat in your circuit and nothing trips because we're still only drawing the 45 amps we're under our 50 even though we're right on that limit so what we recommend is as a part of regular maintenance before the season and especially after the season as well if you're going to be potentially leaving your boat for weeks at a time during the winter check that receptacle make sure all the pins are clean check the boat side receptacle again check the pins are clean they look good they're not worn down and that when you plug in the socket it's got a tight fit on there so that there's no wiggle room because that little bit of loss of contact if the cord is moving can also cause scenarios like this um Regular maintenance to these cords so swapping them out with a new cord or even a smart plug which has the heavy duty pins and a clamp that connects to your boat side receptacle having those definitely helps prevent this type of scenario so just make sure that you're doing regular checks to your Shore power cord even if you don't see any apparent wear or deterioration of the panel it's a small cost to replace the cord and the bolt side receptacle if there was happened to be a fire it's going to be catastrophic as opposed to spending a couple hundred dollars on new cords thanks for watching boating Tech talk and if you have any other questions or information such as Brian please be sure to send it through and check out our YouTube channel