lowrance x55a/tilt motor blowing fuse

[Jack Stasney]

Okay just wired up my boat and I've got one lingering issue. To start I've got my boat motor including the tilt motor hooked up to one battery. All of my other electronics are hooked up to a second different battery. Here is the problem. When I have my lowrance x55a on when the motor is running I will end up blowing the 20 amp fuse on my tilt motor and the x55a will cut out repeatedly turning on/off. When the motor is off the x55a runs great. I don't know where to start with this one. I triple checked all of my wiring and the motor is completely separate from everything else. Anybody got any ideas?

[Jack Stasney]

Okay so I did find that my bilge pump was wired backwards. Don't know if this would contribute to the problem that I am having. I've switched the wiring on the bilge and I'll test it out.

[Jack Stasney]

Figured out this one and thought I'd post it as it was a very interesting fix. I had installed a combo RPM/Hrs meter, the wiring for this this turned out to be the culprit. The way this was installed was to wrap a wire around one of the spark plug wires and then; at least on my boat, I had to run it to the console. Turns out this was inducing some kind of interference with the transducer on my lowrance. When I had my engine running both the RPM/hr meter and lowrance transducer wiring combined creating an interference on my tilt motor wiring and blew the 20 AMP fuse on my tilt motor. Remember all this wiring ie. the transducer, tilt motor, and RPM/Hr meter was running along together for about 10 feet or so. To fix it I disconnected the wire wrapped around the spark plug that sends the signal to the RPM/hr meter. Went out yesterday to test and the tilt motor and lowrance worked perfectly. Now all I need to do is figure out a way to hook up the RPM/Hr meter as I would like to know this info. I was thinking about maybe a shielded wire, or possibly running the wire for this meter away from everything else, or some combination of both of these.