TODAY I LEARNED

Are you down to earth?

Lagoon’s like many other boats have an earth plate attached to their hulls.

On our L450S its mounted on the inside of the Starboard hull. The purpose of the earth plate is exactly that, to earth your mains voltage generator sources.

Not your shore power, as this should be earthed back onto shore, but your Generator and Inverter if you have them fitted.

The other thing that should be attached here is your mast and we’ll talk about this in another post because its important.

But a little know fact is that if you do not get a generator installed at the factory you earth plate may not be wired up, and an after market inverter install could suffer from the same problem.

Despite having a factory installed generator our own L450S wasn’t earthed at the time we installed our Inverter and we had to wire both to gain compliance for insurance. Be warned and check.

Check your mains voltage sources are earthed at your earth plate, that is your Generator and Inverter. Its a very important safety issue if it is not.

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2 Responses

  1. The plate is generally for ground for HF/SSB. It makes sense to use it for single-point ground for other systems. If you’re going to ground the mast and rigging (perhaps out of misguided “lightning protection” be sure to isolate the VHF antenna mount so you don’t get a noise-inducing ground loop on the VHF (ground through mast and ground through coax shield).

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