Raritan Engineering Company your electric toilets suppliers would like to share with you these topics we thought would be of interest to you this month regarding the benefits of a remote boat engine kill switch.

Your electric toilets experts talk about how a safety-stop lanyard — aka engine kill switch — comes standard with marine power systems to instantly shut down propulsion if the helmsman gets tossed from the boat. Yet many skippers forget that they’re tethered and walk away from the wheel, inadvertently killing the engine. 

Fell Marine’s MOB+ wireless man-overboard systems resolve this issue. Essentially, a remote xFob that you wear connects wirelessly using the WiMEA protocol to a Fell xHub on the boat. When a wearer falls overboard, it breaks the signal and the engine shuts down. 

Install the xHub

Select a spot near the wheel and cut a standard 21/16-inch-diameter hole, making sure you have clearance behind it for the 61/2-inch-long xHub antenna (it is flexible and can bend slightly). Remove the xHub nut and attach the antenna to the back of the unit.

Connect to Power

Take care to turn off the onboard battery power before wiring the connector cable to an onboard power source. The connector cable has a five-wire color-coded pigtail. Connect the red (positive) wire to a stable, positive 12-volt DC source with a 1- to 3-amp fuse with either a marine in-line fuse holder or a fuse block, neither of which is supplied with the Fell system. 

Remote Boat Engine Kill Switch Can Save Lives

See your choice of electric toilets here at Raritan Engineering and see how we always take care of your marine sanitation supply needs.

Connect Signal Wires

Two of the remaining three pigtails are used to connect the signal wires to the existing kill switch on your boat. To determine which two, visit fellmarine.com for a wire schematic for your engine brand.

Test the System

Test while tied to a dock. Turn on the engine. If you wired the system to the existing kill switch, pull the lanyard to ensure it works. Reconnect the lanyard and restart the engine. Submerge the xFob Multifob in the ocean or lake, or walk with it until the engine stops. The xHub will light up red and emit a sound signal to indicate a man overboard. 

Two 7-meter-long sailboats are set to return next month to California, after nearly 8 months tacking across the Pacific Ocean. Puttering along at half-speed, they will be heavy with barnacles and other growth. No captains will be at their helms.

That is not because of a mutiny. These sailboats, outfitted with sensors to probe the ocean, are semi autonomous drones, developed by Saildrone, a marine tech startup based in Alameda, California, in close collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Washington, D.C.

After World War II, most sea surface data were collected from ships. Then came buoys and satellites. Now, NOAA scientists want to send in the drones. “We could be making the next epochal advancement in oceanography,” says Craig McLean, NOAA’s assistant administrator for oceanic and atmospheric research and acting chief scientist.  

Richard Jenkins, an engineer and Saildrone’s founder, smelled an opportunity. He had built a sailboat on wheels called Greenbird that in 2009 broke the land-speed record for a wind-powered vehicle, reaching 202 kilometers per hour on a dry lake bed in Nevada. Afterward, he helped two ocean-minded philanthropists, Eric and Wendy Schmidt, outfit their research vessel, the R/V Falkor, at a cost of $60 million.

The first Pacific test started on 5 September 2017, when two saildrones, 1005 and 1006, set out from San Francisco, California, for equatorial waters. Satellites had spotted cold tongues of surface water extending westward from the South American coast, an indicator of a strong La Niña, El Niño’s opposite number. 

In addition to temperature, wind, and solar radiation data, the Pacific saildrones are measuring how the ocean and air exchange gases like carbon dioxide and oxygen, and they are using Doppler instruments to gauge currents coursing up to 100 meters below the surface.