Today a fellow boater on the same dock saw me at the boat and asked me if I knew that the bow thruster was operating for 10 minutes -- he wondered if I was in the boat doing maintenance on it. It then went off again and he checked and I wasn't there so he was on his way to the marina office to get them to call me when I happened to come down to our boat. We came back from a cruise yesterday and I forgot to turn off the main thruster switches. The remote control was in the hot sun and maybe this was the cause of the bow thruster going off for long periods?? The panel at the helm control was off when I arrived. I moved the remote out of the sun and turned off the main thruster switches. I then turned the switches back on and tested the system and everything worked fine including the remote. I will make sure to turn off the main switches in the future but could it simply be that the remote heated up too much and activated the thruster or maybe something else going on?? Help! I also put on the dark screen on the starboard sliding window to reflect away some of the sun. Could this extended activation have harmed the thruster motor??
If it was the remote being heated up, that is very weird and something to be aware of for sure.
Without asking you to experiment it would be interesting to get a response from the Thruster manufacturer and/or the outfit that makes the Thruster's remote. Even RT could have an interest in this issue.
As a precaution it's never good to leave any electronics such that they can be heated or cooled beyond their designed operating temperature limits.
I had a self operating bow Thruster once also on my 2013 R-29. . The cause was corrosion in the wire harness (it was not properly sealed). Ranger Tugs took care of it, and I had no further issues. My current boat is a 2015 R-31, and I have never had a problem with either Thruster.
I'm not sure what's worse; a malfunctioning Thruster or a malfunctioning Autopilot.
I say this as my Autopilot was malfunctioning on my R-25 when I purchased it.
There were two things wrong per Garmin
1) The Shadow Drive's pump was mis-located behind the helm which had been installed in a position higher than the helm's hydraulic reservoir tank. I believe this Shadow Drive positioning was corrected by RT on further boats after being instructed by Garmin about its proper positioning. 🙂
2) When selecting a 1º change while the Autopilot's Heading feature was engaged resulted in a MOB course pattern. This was VERY alarming as this resulted in the boat performing a sudden and severe turn to Starboard in my case and in addition the Autopilot would resist me taking control of the wheel. The sudden activation of the MOB activity was a much harder problem to resolve than 1) above. After 4 hours on the water with a Garmin expert it was nailed down to a software configuration issue. The interesting thing about this problem was that the Garmin expert onboard with me could not replicate the issue, whereas I could 100% of the time. Garmin considered me to have magic fingers. :lol: After the Garmin expert with me could not figure things out, he made a call to Sweden while onboard with me (or maybe it was Norway) to talk with Garmin's Autopilot software guru. After a few back and forth conversations the guru had my Garmin person change the Autopilots software configuration for the incremental heading changes for the Hold Heading feature and finally resolved the issue. Weird things can happen at times I guess and software glitches will always be lurking around with us.
