Electrical upgrade to 90 pq 290
 

I know there has been alot of talk about pq short cutting on wiring to the helm...with all the voltage drops across all the loads and dimming lights....etc.
I am planning on doing this upgrade this summer my question is directed to those who have do it already. I plan to run a big guage hot wire and ground
wire from starboard engine to helm and tie all loads in with bus bars...and not jump from one to the other...same with the grounds. My question is this, did
you tie into the hot starter lead where the original wiring started and just terminated it there? Im getting tired of running at night and my lights dim when i turn other loads on...alt guages show nearly NO charge at night when lights are on...and when I turn on docking lights...well...they just about kill everything. This is what im going to upgrade to elliminate these issues...did you all do it like this and does it make a big difference?? Thankyou for you input and suggestions!

My Avenger wasn’t too bad, but at night there would be minor diming going on if certain accessories were turned on. The quickest easiest fix for me was running a heavy 8 or 10ga ground wire from one of the batteries to the ground bus bar behind the rocker switches on the dash. To test the improvement, with the boat not running I turned on the blower motors and touched and untouched the new heavy ground wire to the factory grounded bus bar. With the new ground you could actually hear the blower motor speed up each time I made contact with it.

I didnt realize there was a ground bus bar behind there...You only ran ground....not both? I am gonna do something this year because its really bad...My engine cover lift is getting slower these days too!

My 93 290 had these voltage issues at the helm, drove me crazy. Finally added heavy gauge wires from engine compartment to helm. When I tried to transmit on the VHF, it would drop to 7 volts and flash low battery on the Icom radio display. One of the very few PQ disappointments. KS

Ksflyer1...did you do both power and ground..where did u tie it in at the helm?

Yes, on my Avenger anyways there is a ground bus bar that is epoxied to the underside of the rocker switch panel. I only ran the heavy ground not a power line. From what I been told it’s a ground issue not a power supply issue on these boats. If you want your hatch ram to work faster this won’t fix that problem, you need to get a hatch relay box or sometimes called a hatch accelerator box. I installed one on my boat 9 years ago and it made a huge difference in engine hatch lifting speed. There around 50 bucks I think and you can get them from CP Performance, Eddie Marine, and some other performance oriented boat supply places. What the box does is let your Hatch motor get full voltage directly from the batteries close by in the engine compartment instead of the power traveling all the way to the switch on the dash and back to the hatch. The switch on the dash still operates the hatch up and down thru the relay box.

I tied my new heavy gauge ground wire to the negative post on the battery, but going to the engine block would be fine too.

New power and ground to the dash bus bar. Did not do the hatch ram upgrade, but I can definitely see how that would resolve the lift issue. My problem was VHF radio voltage. KS

Yes, the lift ram is wired as i thought. I would just wire it into a relay and let the switch provide ground to close the relay, this way...it will pull big current right from relay to motor....

I ran my VHF ground right to the battery and added a the Newmar noise filter, radio is crystal clear with no interferance now.

http://www.newmartelecom.com/Noise-F...e-Filters.html

Its probably easier and a shorter run most times to just run the power wires to the battery selector switch....and make sure to use a fuse or circuit breaker near that connection...you don't need a live wire running the length of the cockpit in case it ever was to get shorted out for what ever reason!
Ground wires i usually just went straight to the battery...and i also made a nice thick jumper to connect the two motors together in the middle so they all share a common ground.
Look in the past postings for my diagram on the hatch relay...it will speed things up for you. :)