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 okay Nigel thank you for joining me today to chat more about Marine electrical and electrical Solutions electronic Solutions on boats thank you for carving out the time this is the boat show season so a lot of people are busy dreaming about how to make their boats better and with that in mind I just wanted to kick off a little bit I know that you've been promoting and doing sharing your knowledge with your courses online and as a good segue to the stuff that you see within the course that you're teaching and please feel to elaborate on this as well do you want to share with us a little bit about the common questions or the common things that your students are searching to you know become better at what are the what are the things that voters you think are seeking these days from what you're seeing in your course well I think about also electrically loaded these days and we've got so much equipment on the refrigerators hot water heaters all the navigational electronics and so on that fundamentally anybody that's going to take a boat offshore has to have a basic understanding of boat Electrics and that's what we focus in on a on a basic electrical course we may we start from electrons and we work our way up to a whole boat system and we in between we cover putting together the wiring the terminals sizing everything putting the over current protection on battery chargers alternators all the bits and pieces that we have on all of our boats today every one of us has these bits and pieces and the idea is to give people an overall view of what it takes to make your system work well and to make them work safely I I've done hundreds of surveys of boat systems over the years and I've almost never got on a boat including all the new boats I've surveyed that was fully compliant in terms of for example over current protection and then I see all kinds of errors with respect to to me terminals on one post well you know you'll see the stuff yourself so the goal is to give everybody a basic understanding of their electrical systems and to do it on a way that's understandable and bit by bit we build up through I don't know how many lessons we got in there 59 I think so it takes a certain amount of perseverance on the part of the end users but I think if somebody works their way through the system they'll have a pretty good grasp of all the basics that they need from certainly for a bulk DC system we don't get into AC systems in that first course help we treat them separately in another course yeah it's a it's a job you must see this all the time Jeff you get on boats and you'll see all kinds of things that just fundamentally wrong and then it's not rocket science he's a simple mistakes that that the boat builders make or the worst of the boat owners that do their own wiring without having acquired the knowledge and they put all kinds of lousy systems on boats and then they cause trouble all the time and then they get frustrated and they want to go skiing instead of sailing and so part of the goal of what we're doing is to make people enjoy their voting more so that they don't have to spend hours and days troubleshooting problems on the boats yeah you're bringing a good point and I try to inspire people through it it's sort of like it's a personal Everest is the way I describe it you know boat ownership is really we all push ourselves differently but it's a challenging situation it's a situation that requires like you say dedication to learn the systems to be a better Boulder and electrical is just one part of it Electronics is another one there's all these different sort of facets to boating and you're right no boat is I've never seen a perfect boat electrically some are closer than others for sure and I think as a boat owner you know the courses and I remember doing the same thing you know the blogs and all this just educating oneself to get to closer as close as you can to what it should be and that takes a lot in learning what should right I mean there's a lot of debate on pros and cons for everything so yeah good on you the to kind of pass on that knowledge and help every everybody else along their Journey because it's a it's the hardest one it's not for the meek of heart but it's totally worth it when it works and you feel reliable we've made it tough on ourselves when I first went voting we didn't have an electrical system on the boat we we sailed from England to Amsterdam and we have one device that required a battery which was a death Sounder that didn't work we actually had a long light and aside from that we had kerosene Lantus and so on so it was much easier than all we needed to understand was how to raise and set the sails and how to how to do basic piloting skills we didn't need all these other skills so we have kind of imposed this on ourselves but having done it we've got much more comfortable lifestyles our boats but if they're not going to frustrate the hell out of us we have to understand the underlying systems behind them and we have to make so they're installed properly and and if they are then they'll run for years and sometimes decades without creating problems for people but it's getting that insulation right in the first place it's really critical yeah so true you know and I I've learned this stuff the hard way over the years it's not like I've come into this knowing all this stuff I've been at this for 40 years now and I've made pretty much every mistake in the book that's the mistakes in my own books so but the bottom line here is it's not rocket science it's something that anybody that's willing to apply themselves to can learn we're not having to deal with complicated algorithms and formulas and stuff it's all fairly simple it's just an awful lot of it and we have to get all the bits and pieces correct yeah so true so true it's I and it's okay to be humbled you know that's the whole point making errors and learning from it is part of boat ownership it's like learning a bike and ride a bike but not at four years old like some of us do but learning it at older age when we're not maybe comfortable falling down all the time you know not figure not literally but figuratively you know it's the lessons are hard on a boat and especially to keep the systems that we've learned to love and give us like you say the Creature Comforts that we've come accustomed to like Refrigeration heat lighting navigation system Entertainment Systems some of us will partake in some of those and to keep those systems up and run them reliably takes a good understanding of how they work especially if you ever are called upon troubleshooting is the hardest of them all it relies on oneself understanding how it works to figure out what's broken so yeah it's but you know what I mean if it was easy it's like golf if it was easy if boating was easy many of us wouldn't be doing it it's certainly what calls me to it is that it is challenging yeah on the top so the other big difference the falling off a bike is that it's a lot more expensive to fix the problem oh yeah fall off like in your skin your knee and it's self-healing all it takes is time but without systems if you square it up it's a lot more expensive sorting you know yeah so true you want to get it right as close as you can the first time although we all make mistakes myself included along the journey Lots 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)