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hi everyone I'm Jeff Cote here with Pacific yacht systems and we're doing another boating Tech talk we've got a quest follow-up question from the Nigel Calder video which we did uh just recently and in that video we talked about the importance of equipment leakage circuit interrupter elci not to be confused with ground fault circuit interrupter similar but different I know that some movies are slowly adding these to shore power receptacles but you mentioned that you can install one on your boat what's involved why is it so important there's different manufacturers that are creating these elcis one of them being blue seas and they've actually also come out with a basically a little a surface mounted box where you can average a circuit breaker so it would allow you to interrupt or intercept the AC power coming into the boat so before it actually even hits your AC main panel you might actually install this new surface mount panel with any LCI breaker between the shore power and your AC panel now of course if you're going to have multiple short Powers you're going to have multiple elcis especially if they're running in parallel if they're a source selector then yeah you can get away with maybe just one but if you're going to run like some bigger boats have multiple 30 amps some boats have 330 amps at 120 coming into boat you're going to need three lcis but for the voters out there that have you know either 50 app or 30 amp running their boat you're going to be able to install an elci breaker on your Shore power Inlet between the shore power Inlet and the panel and the reason you would do this is um you're trying to measure on the AC at Delta uh between a difference Delta between the hot conductor and the neutral conductor and um the ground circuit interrupter was very sort of tight in terms of its tolerance and would often nuisance trip meaning a GFCI interrupter installed at a pedestal of a marina for instance could often trip and those trips would be almost impossible even to a consultant or to an electrician to resolve there'd be devices on board that would just make that trip be a nuisance not a reality the LC High has a basically a little bit more sort of wiggle room for nuisance um tripping but uh stops it at enough current in milliamps that it actually is going to actually save lives without tripping all the time as the GFC eyes so it's really a way to make sure that if you're neutral and you're hot or not balanced then the current's going somewhere else and that current is going on the ground and if you don't have a good grounding conductor on your boat which some of us don't uh then that current is going through the water and if that current's going through the water and you are in a marina that has a fresh water source uh somewhere in the marina then the top layer of the water in that little Cove or Harbor or Marina is going to be fresh water on top and salt water underneath and here's where it gets crazy salt water is highly conductive but fresh water isn't people swimming on the surface are more likely to be electrocuted in water that is non-conductive fresh water then really conductive water salt water and so um there's a very high likelihood of electrocution especially with stray currents in the water where there's a fresh water source and depending on where your boat is some a lot of coves have fresh water coming in and in the winter time we see that here where a lot of salt water marine is actually the top layer is fresh and we see them freeze I would advise all boaters to start educating themselves on the benefits of an the LCI and over time start considering modifying their boat to have any LCI breaker come on on board so that you protect for having any sort of dangerous currents being going on the grounding connector and again the worst case here would be not through the shore power uh cabling but actually through uh the Water because our boats uh especially in North America here the large majority of them have the DC and AC grounds tied together for safety and that's how it should be definitely uh certainly the code here in North America that says that yeah elci makes sense it's just a little bit of cost and some time to put it in but it's highly worth it and I would suggest all of you to educate and figure out when's the right time for you to do it on your boat thanks for asking that question by the way and safe boating 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 English (auto-generated)