Refit Insanity

[westsail42]

Disagree on the battery chargers. Their computer evolution has gone way beyond my old Lewco Ferro-Resonant charger. I no longer need to replace my flooded cells every two or three years (going on eight years for the current ones!)

Yes, there are cheaply built, sold and supported brands out there (Xintex comes to mind).
But there are good ones too (Mastervolt, Victron, Charles).

Do your research. Buy the best and cry once.

I think this can be applied to just about any piece of boating equipment.

As for toys, they are fun to have. Just don't come to rely upon them, or freakout when they fail. Be prepared to say "screw it" and deal with it later.

When preparing for installation, consider the fail scenario and what any backup or redundancy plan would be.

[MacG]

Point is that the chargers you mention are quite costly: Mastervolt and Victron in particular.
A 20 amps loader/charger (not speaking of inverter) is around 3-400 Euro.
That is not particularly cheap compared to a simple 20 amps garage charger.

However, with different batteries on the market, agm, gel and the like, it is wise to buy a good quality one.

[westsail42]

Originally Posted by MacG

Point is that the chargers you mention are quite costly: Mastervolt and Victron in particular.
A 20 amps loader/charger (not speaking of inverter) is around 3-400 Euro.
That is not particularly cheap compared to a simple 20 amps garage charger.

However, with different batteries on the market, agm, gel and the like, it is wise to buy a good quality one.

Well, I never met someone who said boating was cheap!

Generally, the less you pay in price, the more you will pay in headaches (failures, bad support, etc). Which can be said about nearly everything these days.

As someone else said, you want your cake and eat it too????

[barnakiel]

Then we must look at whether the quality (no more) things are as expensive as they used to be 30 years ago. I mean things like a Mercedes. Quality.

30 years ago only doctors and lawyers had them in my village. Now it seems every thug has one. Off course, I am aware of the fact that thugs just got richer ;-).

I think many top shelf companies went down with quality but they went down with the price too. No proof, just a guess. HR is one example.

b.

[rebel heart]

Cruisers have enough time and money to do what they do, and marketing companies have solid ways of exploiting that. Blame Nigel Calder as well for barely even discussing "sailing" in his cruising handbook.

[westsail42]

Just the other day my wife and I were lamenting power tool prices and quality over the years.

It used to be Makita was the best quality, yet the most expensive. Now they are just as cheap (in price and quality) as their competitors (DeWalt, Ryobi, etc).

Other brands followed similarly. Black&Decker, Skil, Craftsman.