Services
Marine electrical troubleshooting, diagnostics, and corrective work for sailboats and powerboats.
What I Work On
Electrical Troubleshooting
Intermittent faults, dead circuits, breaker trips, voltage drop, parasitic drain, and corrosion failures.
Charging & Battery Systems
Alternators, regulators, shore chargers, DC-DC charging, and battery bank performance verification.
Lithium Battery Conversions
LiFePO4 system design, BMS integration, alternator protection, and conversion from lead-acid.
Shore Power & AC Systems
Inlet and distribution faults, GFCI and galvanic protection verification, grounding and bonding.
Stray Current & Corrosion
Hull potential measurement, stray current testing, galvanic isolator verification, and bonding evaluation.
Thermal Imaging
Infrared inspection of panels, connections, and wiring under load to identify hot spots and failing terminations.
NMEA 2000 & Electronics
Backbone faults, terminations, device dropouts, and network voltage verification.
Bilge & Critical Circuits
Bilge pumps, float switches, alarms, auto/manual logic, and corrective wiring.
Wiring & Documentation
Circuit tracing, labeling, termination upgrades, routing improvements, and correction of unsafe modifications.
System Mapping
Panel circuit index, battery and charging path, shore power path, and annotated photo set — delivered as a PDF.
Communications & Navigation
VHF, AIS, GPS antenna systems, feedline integrity, radio installation, and chartplotter integration.
Solar & Inverter Systems
Solar array integration, MPPT controller setup, inverter installation, and system sizing for liveaboards and offshore passage makers.
Finding What Others Miss
Most electrical problems on boats aren't obvious. They're hidden in connectors, buried in bilges, and invisible until something stops working at the wrong moment.
These are two examples from recent jobs — a failed solder joint causing an intermittent power fault, and a corrosion-driven open circuit inside a connector that looked fine from the outside. Neither was findable without the right equipment and a methodical approach to isolation.
What a Routine Inspection Finds
This is the factory wire tie that came bundled around the VHF radio power cable. It was never removed during installation. At some point the steel core inside the plastic sleeve made contact with 12VDC.
The steel core of a factory twist tie is roughly 28 gauge. Extremely high resistance. When 12 volts finds a path through a conductor that thin, it doesn't draw enough current to trip a fuse, but it generates significant heat right at the wire tie. Sustained over time, that heat transfers directly into whatever the wire tie is wrapped against.
In this case it was wrapped against the VHF power cable. By the time I found it, the plastic had melted completely off the twist tie and the insulation had burned through on the wires underneath, leaving bare copper exposed inside the bundle which allowed current to flow through the ground wire, and generating enough heat to melt the insulation off the wires.
The VHF was working normally. No breaker had tripped. Nothing had failed. The owner had no idea it was there. Exposed terminals on boats are common. Factory wire ties that never got removed are common. This is what happens when the two meet over time, and it's exactly what a safety inspection is looking for.
Rates
Service & Corrective Work hourly
$150 per hour. All work billed at a single hourly rate. No trip fees within the central Bay Area.
ABYC Electrical Safety Inspection flat rate
A focused assessment of your boat's critical electrical systems — shore power, battery state of health, bilge pump circuit, hull potential, and any visible wiring concerns. Includes a written findings summary.
$150 — credited in full toward any work booked within 30 days.
Travel within the central San Francisco Bay Area is included. Extended travel may be billed separately.
All diagnostic and corrective work is performed to ABYC standards — the recognized benchmark for safe marine electrical installation in the United States.