Getting to know our Scheiber

We expect many owners first experience of distributed CAN based electrical systems will be when they pick up their Garcia. In our last boat, a wire ran from the switch panel to the light/fan/etc and back. In the Garcia power goes to distribution ‘blocs’ to which the light/fan/etc is connected, and the power is turned on/off by a message over the CAN network. After about hull 24 the Scheiber CAN based power distribution was used not just for lights, but for almost all power distribution.

There is lots of discussion about whether this more complex system is ideal for an exploration style boat, but for us the important thing is been learning the skills to fix the system when it fails (its on a boat). We are no experts, but we thought we would collect together some stories and learnings that might help other owners.

Here are a few things that were not immediately obvious to us:

1. Most of the lights and fans are on lighting blocs. Your light switches talk wirelessly to these lighting blocs and you can have fun reconfiguring them to switch on the things you expect them to switch on.
2. The navigation lights are on a lighting bloc. If the bloc fails, your nav lights fail. You need to have a plan. Ours did fail when we were in port and we wrote about it here.
3. Bloc 9s are used for most of the power distribution. These have some configuration options that can have unforeseen and expensive consequences. You can read about one such experience here.
4. One of the options you can configure on a Bloc 9 is to automatically power on when the system restarts. This might be set for a Fridge/Freezer so that they come on after a power outage. Perhaps somewhat less obvious is when you leave the boat for a few weeks, turn off the fridge on the Navicolor, and leave it propped open. If there is a power out event whilst your are away, the fridge will restart and run flat out as it is open, and therefore using the same amount of power as a small town.

Here’s some things we would have told ourselves to do when we picked up the boat, based on our current 6 months of experience:

1. Get the Scheiber English documentation. There is not much, but its worth having.
2. Make sure you have the Schieber schematics from Garcia. These will tell you which bloc runs the ‘chart table light’ and where that bloc is physically located.
3. To do any configuration on the Navicolor you will need a 4 digit code. Get this before you leave.
4. Reconfigure a light switch. This will practice using the schematics to find a bloc. Also we like that the switches now make sense to us!
5. Check the options on the Navicolor for the autopilot. Try to bypass the CAN switching using the fuse on the Bloc 9 for the autopilot. If the Navicolor fails you might need to do this.
6. Write down a plan for navigation light failure and Navicolor display failure