Tips for Winterizing Your Boat’s Marine Electronics
Should you be the proud owner of a new boat, then you need to know a few helpful tips when it comes to winterizing your marine electronics. The following tips from Jimmy Gross Marine Services LLC should be able to help you out with this.
Remove and Store
When possible, remove your electronics from the boat and keep them at home.
Back Them Up
Save your routes, waypoints, and tracks to external media. If you have a multifunction display, you should consider backing it up to a MicroSD card or sync it to your mobile device. So if anything bad should happen, at least you will have your data saved.
Wash and Cover
only use fresh water, mild soap, and a microfiber towel to clean your electronics, then protect each one with a sun cover. Wash your radar scanners, GPS sensors, and thermal cameras to remove any salt or bird droppings before shrink-wrapping the lot.
Lens Advice
If you are lucky enough to have a FLIR camera, put it into the “Park” position, this faces the lens surface down so it is protected against damage.
Not Too Tight
If you are shrink-wrapping your own boat. Take care when covering your radar and satellite antennas. If you wrap them too tight, you run the risk of warping open-array antennas or cracking the dome housings.
Connector Care
Make sure your plugs and cables are not exposed, to protect the pins and contacts from corrosion, label the cables as you remove them for reference come the spring.
Transducer Tip
If you have an in-hull transducer and it uses a reservoir, check to see what type of liquid it has inside. It should be propylene glycol, however, sometimes it may just be water, which will freeze and eventually split the housing.
Power Down
Switch off all the circuit breakers, your boat may also have power to NMEA 2000 networks. So switch them all off if you wish to preserve your batteries for next spring.
To conclude today’s blog on marine electronics, if you want to know about our services, and you live in or around the Pensacola, FL region, please feel free to call us at (850) 290-4847 anytime.