Diagnosing an alarm

While on a cruise today we started to hear a high pitch sound coming from help. Sounded like an alarm but was not real loud. Oil preassure was fine, temp was fine, same with fuel and electric. Called Seatow and they took a quick look and listen and said everything looked fine and that it could be a faulty sensor. We headed in just to be safe and part way back the sound stopped. Any thoughts on what I should check?

Thanks

Note I manually Checked oil, collect etc once we got back to the dock.

smoke or carbon monoxide detector?

Checked those too. Sound was coming from w/in helm supply and was not especially Lou's just high pitched.

What engines do you have?

Some navigation electronics have alarms. Occasionally a big fish will go under the transducer and and trigger the shallow water alarm. My Garmin will also trigger for low voltage.

Ted

We have a 2007 Pilot 34 with twin Yanmar 240 engines, and have had a similar event happen. It started barely audible, then would get louder over time. All gauges were fine, manual checks were fine also. The alarm switches on the Yanmar are separate from the sending unit for the gauges. It turned out to be wiring to one of the alarm switches shorting to ground.

It was very frustrating trying to figure out what was going on. We have an audible alarm for each engine that covers temp, oil pressure and gear temp. From the helm you couldn't tell which engine was alarming, or for what reason. I ended up eliminating the problem by converting the gauges to NMEA 2000 and using Maretron display to monitor everything.

Assuming you have a Yanmar, the switches go to ground when activated and are connected together so any one of them activating sounds the alarm. This makes troubleshooting more difficult. Search for a thread from RGano on his solution, or if you are interested in the NMEA 200 approach, I have a thread on that.

Thanks this is a big help, we have a single Yanmar 350. I am also thinking it is just a wiring issue as the problem went away on our way in. tow service I called felt the same. Volume never changed it was just in the background. Will trace and troubleshoot the ground this week. thanks again will report back on resolution.

I chased a sound like that one day for about 30 minutes. Turned out to be the stereo system. It was between channels and was just transmitting some form of static.

Success. Dock buddy came aboard this morning and traced the fault to the steering indicator. Simple replacement