Engine running very rough QSB 5.9L

Well, I hope you are done with that fiasco. Time to go out and enjoy the boat and the weather!

Crazy story!

Completely unrelated story time...as a photographer I once changed my enlarger light source, developer, and paper at the same time. Took me months to get straightened away and producing consistently again. From then on I only change one element at a time, test, assess results, and either adopt the change or go back and try another way.

Only somewhat applicable to boat systems...

Wish you years of smoooooth running

Love it when a problem is solved.

Even when you bought some parts you didn't need.

Good thing those mechanics have "rounds" to discuss cases.

Ken

I had a very similar problem. Some of my Twin Disc EC-300 control heads (of which there are 6 on my boat) would occasionally boot up "backwards" -- so that, for example, I can have control on a wing station, then switch to the pilot house only to find that putting the gears into forward would have the effect of selecting reverse. There was absolutely no pattern to this failure. It could happen at any station, and whether or not that station was the selected station when the system was started up. No one could figure it out. Turned out it was a low voltage condition (everything runs off the house bank) that wasn't otherwise noticeable -- there was enough voltage to run the starters, and none of the electronics (or bow thruster) ever shut down from low voltage. But when the capacity of the batteries became too limited, I replaced them and the problem went away.

Well I reckon you learned a lot about your engine!!! Glad this is over with!!

Welcome to the club of really, really odd problems. I thought I was the only one who got them.

That is a painful lesson!
I assume that the problem didn't manifest itself with the introduction of the Duo Charge? It was fine for some time after that change?
Really strange!
I remember when we were investigating charging options for our boat, hearing from a Balmar engineer about something to do with incompatibility of their regulators on Cummins Common Rail injected engines.
I asked Cummins and they were aware of the issue but promised that they were well beyond this issue with the current designs. I believe that there was some kind of rf interference that wrecked havoc with the control module of the engine.
I wonder if this is what you ran into?
Curious,
Bruce

TTree

It really not an exclusive club, any boat owner in time will have their own story to tell. ��

That duo-charge thing may be using high frequency oscillators to do voltage conversion, and put some noise into the DC buss. Engine apparently does not like it.

A bit puzzling as engine electronics should be designed to filter out such noise. Maybe the frequency of the noise was just right (wrong).

Got an oscilloscope handy??

Ski

"Got an oscilloscope handy??"

Your kidding I presume as I wouldn't know what to do with or be be able to spell oscilloscope. ��

Bruce, you are right. The problem didn't occur right after I made that change to the Duo Charge. If it had, it is something that I would have thought of right away.

As I have mentioned before, my house bank is getting tired. This weekend we are on the hook and the battery bank didn't even make it through a 1/3 of the night powering my wife's CPAP. Normally, it will go all night without a problem AND make coffee in the morning without having to turn on the genset. Just a WAG butt maybe the declining health of the house bank is an issue.

This morning I couldn't find my multimeter. I may have inadvertently taken it off the boat. It is now time that I get serious about deciding which way to go on the battery replacement.

Once small, and expensive plus to this whole sorry affair is that with the new injectors I am getting at least another 100 rpm at the same fuel flow as I did before.

dhays said:

Once small, and expensive plus to this whole sorry affair is that with the new injectors I am getting at least another 100 rpm at the same fuel flow as I did before.

Click to expand...

Holy logic!(Bat)

Happy for you, the mystical problem QSB was removed. Could never have thought of a problem causing altenator.

Thank you for sharing this problem and solution for TF.

Balmar has had a huge quality control issue lately, their alternator regulators are hugely unreliable, like Xantrex.

Xsbank said:

Balmar has had a huge quality control issue lately, their alternator regulators are hugely unreliable, like Xantrex.

Click to expand...

When I bought the boat I found a new Balmar Alt regulator still in the box. At some point the PO had bought it but never installed it.

Dave

Be very careful with your "new" house bank and other battery setups. You may find yourself in a similar pickle.

If you merely replaced what you currently have for batteries, you know what you are getting. Resist the new better battery gizmo setup because we TF ites talked you into it, with of course no skin in the game on our part.

sunchaser said:

Dave

Be very careful with your "new" house bank and other battery setups. You may find yourself in a similar pickle.

If you merely replaced what you currently have for batteries, you know what you are getting. Resist the new better battery gizmo setup because we TF ites talked you into it, with of course no skin in the game on our part.

Click to expand...

Ahhh, a nice summation of the danger of listening to forum "experts"....
Bruce

sunchaser said:

Dave

Be very careful with your "new" house bank and other battery setups. You may find yourself in a similar pickle.

If you merely replaced what you currently have for batteries, you know what you are getting. Resist the new better battery gizmo setup because we TF ites talked you into it, with of course no skin in the game on our part.

Click to expand...

Ahhh, a nice summation of the danger of listening to forum "experts"....
Bruce

sunchaser said:

Dave

Be very careful with your "new" house bank and other battery setups. You may find yourself in a similar pickle.

If you merely replaced what you currently have for batteries, you know what you are getting. Resist the new better battery gizmo setup because we TF ites talked you into it, with of course no skin in the game on our part.

Click to expand...

I know what you mean. However, I've never been a fan of the 4D and 8D batteries. The more I look at it, the AGM 902 or L16s look like a good match for my needs. I am also used to banks of 6v batteries since that is what I have had on my past two sailboats.

Then again, I could just throw in some VRLA wet cells 8Ds and call it good. ("throw" may not be the right term however).

dhays said:

I know what you mean. However, I've never been a fan of the 4D and 8D batteries. The more I look at it, the AGM 902 or L16s look like a good match for my needs. I am also used to banks of 6v batteries since that is what I have had on my past two sailboats.

Then again, I could just throw in some VRLA wet cells 8Ds and call it good. ("throw" may not be the right term however).

Click to expand...

Seems to me about the "easiest" solution would be AGM 8Ds, assuming you have somebody else hump the weight.

Use the same box(es) you've already got with no modifications, no new interconnects, no worries about off-gassing, no subsequent maintenance tail and no watering system required (contributing mightily to that "easiest" adjective).

Assumes capacity will be sufficient, and assumes your wallet will stand the gaff.

From what you've said about not having time to be away from the dock as much as you'd like, seems like capacity could be fine.

And you wouldn't necessarily have to buy premium AGMs. If, sometime down the pike, you decide capacity isn't sufficient, you could replace worn-out non-premium AGMs with a better engineered system that might meet your needs better going forward from there....

Just thinking out loud on your behalf...

-Chris

All good points Chris.

A little update...

As you may recall, the reason my electronic Cummins QSB was running rough was the Balmar Duo Charge, which I had reconnected, gave the Cummins ECU indigestion. I had gone back to the Blue Seas ACR.

Nothing wrong with the Blue Seas ACR, but I never liked the idea of sharing all the charging action to house bank with a simple start battery. Tonight I hooked up a Xantrex Echo Charger.

The Echo Charger is very similar to the Duo-Charge but dumber. It simply will provide up to 15 amps of charge to the start battery whenever there is over 13v at the house battery. I believe it does this at the same voltage that is being supplied to the house bank.

Simple to install, just three wires. Once installed it started to work and upon starting, the engine ran just fine. So for now anyway, I am going to stay with the Echo Charger and following some advice that Bruce B gave me, not make any other changes right away. Another suggestion of his, remove the offending Duo Charge. That I also did tonight.

FWIW, I really like the Duo Charge and currently have two of them, one charging the thruster bank and the other charging the genset battery.