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hi everyone Jeff Cote here with another question for boatingtechtalk.com so we've got a fellow border that has a navigation system on board an autopilot a chart plotter and after about a week um the chart the chop water stopped working and talking to the dealer this owner was said that this damage of the tarp plotter could be uh from high voltage and the question is Jeff how can I protect my electronics from high voltages okay well first thing is that nowadays luckily nowadays the voltage input voltage range for most Electronics is pretty wide actually not all of them but many of them are going to work on both 24 and 12 volts so you might have an input voltage range from literally nine volts all the way to literally maybe 30 volts because a charging 24 volt battery is not a 24 volts it's you could see 288 temperature compensated 29 so you're going to have a pretty wide range where this device might work from 10 volts to 30 volts so the first thing is today's devices again many of them have a high input range not all of them but some of them do so find out what the range is now if you've got a tight range and your device can only take between 13 from 10 to 14 let's say or 15 and for whatever reason you have voltage spikes on your boat um there are devices uh and we've done this um that are basically 12 volt in 12 volt out now you're saying why would I have something that's an n and the out this thing well it's not literally 12 volts out so it's going to take whatever input voltage it is it could be 9 volts it could be 10 volts 11 volts 12 volt could be even 14 volts and what it takes is it takes that input voltage and outputs a steady voltage on the other side so that other voltage might be 13 4 13 8. and basically it always outputs 13 4 or 13 8. regardless of what happens on the input voltage and so those devices are not too expensive you know uh depending of course on your currency and where you are and might be a couple hundred dollars two three hundred dollars again depending on the currency and what's a dollar Canadian or U.S of course big differences uh depending on markets but it's not a thousand dollar device and what you want to do is you want to look to have a device that can handle the max expected current so if you've got a you know uh let's say this owner has an autopilot well how much autopilot can the can it draw is it going to be 10 amps 5 amps 20 amps how much is the sharpwater going to draw how much maybe a radar is going to draw how much so you add up all your loads and what your maximum amperage is and so make sure that when you purchase that device it can handle maybe a total aggregate load of 30 amps or 50 amps or 40 amps or 20 amps and generally you don't want to buy much more than you need because you ended up paying for more than you need so you want a size and so we do this type of problem not as so much to avoid voltage spikes but to avoid voltage drops so on boats that might have a fly bridge where they're far away from the battery bank and the line loss to get all the way to the fire Bridge makes the electronics at the fly bridge uneasy what we're going to do is we're going to use a DC to DC converter 12 to 12 and stabilize that voltage and so it's a good question you can stabilize voltages for your electronics by doing a 12 to 12 or 24 to 24 to make sure that the voltages are always steady and if you've got that on board and someone tells you that you've got unstable voltages well then you'll know and to be able to turn around and say well that's not possible because effectively my electronics are running off a power supply and if it's running off a power supply there's not going to be voltage drops or voltage spikes and so that's one easy thing to remove off the list for troubleshooting and that's why you might consider putting that device on a boat thanks everyone for watching and if you've got comments on how you use a DC to DC power supplies to even out the voltage on your boat please share because sharing is caring and thanks everyone for watching appreciate it so if you're curious again go on our website and find out more answers and solutions with this sort of setup and thanks for asking and thanks for all of you for listening and tuning in