Damn You Balmar
An oversized alternator seems like a good idea on the surface. Even with a plethora of glass and lithium you will eventually need to supplement your power gen. The motor is already burning dinosaurs, so why not try to capture as much of that energy as possible and cram it into your house batteries? But the motor has another, more important job to do. It needs to motor. Adding the strain of power generation not only piles on wear but adds extra parts (external regulator, serpentine) to break. All things being equal, I’d rather have the stock alternator and cook my backup power another way. The house and engine power grids are separate for a reason.
Defiant was already equipped with an oversized Balmar alternator when I took delivery, so I didn’t have much say in the matter. Once I split the house and engine power grids, any excess power generated by that big white tumor went… nowhere. To avoid exploding Defiant’s single lead acid battery, the matching Balmar regulator choked down the output - so my motor was working harder to produce less. The previous owners also warned me about the rig eating serpentine belts (the forums tended to agree)… all great news.
But the setup was working. I filed it under “don’t touch, get underway” and focused on bigger things.
About two weeks ago I had pulled open the engine compartment to do a coolant flush. The engine was not running, and I had only twisted open a coolant drain - nothing more. But I smelled smoke. I looked up to see the temperature sensor wire on the Balmar regulator was curling away from the unit… and on fire. I yanked it free and smothered it with a rag (in hindsight not super bright), then pulled all the battery terminals. This would be weird normally, but weirder in that I wasn’t running the engine and had not touched the electrical system. My best guess is that there was a short in the wiring harness, and when I was routing the drain hose I jiggled it enough to turn a short into a fire.
OK, I guess the alternator needs to be dealt with now after all.
Swapping back in the stock alternator involved a lot of unknowns, and my focus was/is getting underway, not perfection. So I decided it was best to call Balmar and spend my way out of the problem.
Balmar is the go-to brand for anyone looking to do this type of conversion. They have a great reputation among cruising sailors, and if you look under the hood of a dozen boats you’ll likely see more Balmar alternators than not. Sadly, it is exactly this type of track record that makes a company like Balmar a target for enshittification.
Warning
Enshittification is a bit of a tangent, but I am including a quick explanation here because I refer to it so often.
What is Enshittification?
Cory Doctorow first coined the phrase “enshittification” to describe a unique kind of corporate raiding that has become prevalent over the last 30 years. In simple terms, a company enshittifies in three steps:
Users are won over by excellence - amazing service, excellent products, outstanding deals. This goes on until all the users are bought in and dependent.
Suppliers are won over by excellence - generous terms, amazing support, fair practices. This goes on until the all the suppliers are bought in and dependent.
Once both Users and Suppliers are super invested in a platform, all that expensive quality and service is ripped away, exploding profit margins for the company. Both sides of the equation are locked in, so they continue to pay premium cost for low-quality results.
This is hard for people to wrap their heads around, because it is so nebulous when compared to the corporate raiders of the 1980s and 1990s. When you consider Gordon Gekko, Lawrence Garfield and Edward Lewis it was easy for normal people to understand what made them “bad guys” - they bought a company, fired the people, sold it for parts. Very tangible. But enshittification is a subtle, frog-slow-boiling-in-water kind of corporate bleed-out. Nobody gets fired on day one, no factories close - in fact enshittification often comes with headcount growth, promotions and bonuses as profits soar. The problem is that those profits come from cannibalizing customer trust.
Customer trust is expensive and time consuming to earn. Still, you can build a great brand by making a high-quality product, supporting the product well, and providing excellent service at every touchpoint. If you can do all this profitably, the trust you’ve earned will generate success forever. OR, if you are an enshittification VC, you ask yourself “how much money can we make in the short term by betraying that trust?” Then, you drill through the steps:
Replace high-quality parts with lower quality suppliers, but don’t change your price. Customers still pay the high premium because of your existing reputation, short term profits explode. RMAs increase because the defect rate goes up.
Add friction to your RMAs. Now that returns are exploding, make it harder to return things. Start enforcing crappy clauses in your terms of service, have your support teams deliver bad news, say “I’m sorry” and end the call. Profits continue to explode because the growing angry customer base hasn’t caught up with the reviews from when you were a great company yet. Customer support starts to choke with all the enshittification friction.
Cut off your customer support and close the door for those complaints - you aren’t interested. The goal is to pump as much short-term cash out of users/customers that aren’t aware yet that the company has gone bad. Route users back to worthless support pages, endlessly transfer them and push them off to chat bots, and drive them into voicemails no one will ever answer.
An enshittifier VC taking control of a once trustworthy company is like a demon taking over your body and asking “how much cash can I get out of my sister right now?” the demon knows if you call your sister and say there’s an emergency and you need $10k, she will clear out her savings and come through - that’s the trust. Of course, once you run off she’ll never trust you again; but the demon does not care if trust is destroyed, because exploiting trust is the demon’s business.
The most vile thing about enshittification is that it preys on our social behavior to prolong the decline. When thousands of people have had amazing experiences with a company, most people don’t want to be in the minority of complainers. This leads us to pause, when we should be sounding the alarm that a formerly good company has gone bad.
Eventually it catches up. Once customer trust has been bled dry, margins vanish and the company collapses - the VC is long gone, and all they left is a brand everyone hates.
That is enshittification.
Balmar Phone Call Number One
I called tech support ready with part numbers - an MC-614 regulator paired with a 60-100-J10 alternator. I explained the key points (“fire bad”). I was met with an awkward silence. I then started listing off parts I had researched myself, and asking if they would work with the alternator I was keeping. This time the response was a single “yup.” Great. I mentioned that I really didn’t like how blind I am with this system, and wanted some way to see what the alternator was doing (so maybe I can get an earlier head’s up on the fire thing next time). I must have struck a money nerve, because suddenly he had a whole parts list for me totaling over $700. Cool. Order placed via Hodges Marine.
Install Round One
The installation instructions are just helpful enough to be dangerous. I can understand why the previous owner cut through the stock wiring harness instead of plugging it into the provided adapter - the instructions basically tell you to do so.
The tight quarters and trying to “move fast” by not removing the alternator resulted in a job that took much longer than it should have. I dry fit all the bits, except a single two-prong connector that refused to go into the mated connector on the alternator side. These were very clearly the same connection set, but different manufacturers (slightly different color ABS and chunky seams on the new part). I tried, and tried. I added grease. I shaved off the plastic fuzz on the seams. still, the part refused to budge.
Call To Balmar Round Two
This call was decidedly more helpful, but also less encouraging. The tech I spoke to apologized and said that the crimping machines had been causing issues with the connectors lately, and I might need to clip the ends of the connector to make it fit. OK, $700 in parts and I’m fabricating my own connectors, sure why not. I thanked him and went about trimming the tiny connector wedged in the back of the alternator. Not surprisingly, the cheap ABS plastic fell apart in my hand.
Installation Round Two
OK no more faulty connectors - I crimped in spade contacts on both sides and did my best to seal them up in the confined space. I zip-tied everything out of the way of the big serpentine belt for the moment, then I ran the labyrinth of insanely overpriced cables ($70 for 5m of 16/4 with deutsch connector ends), clipped on the battery lugs, plugged in all the fuses, and crossed my fingers.
Nothing happened.
I should have seen the unit on the little LED display. Or on the bluetooth network, or the N2K backbone that runs the boat. I had paid for, and installed, all the adapters - but all I saw was nothing.
If the new MC-618 regulator was bad, I should have seen the SG-230 shunt. If the shunt was bad, I should have seen the regulator. Instead I saw nothing.
Balmar Call Round Three
The last member of tech support I spoke to at Balmar was as helpful as he could be, given the situation. He stayed on the phone while we stripped away parts and toned out wires, confirming slowly, painfully, that the parts delivered were DOA. He also offered up again that issues they had been having with the crimping machines were causing quality control issues 😡. He issued me an RMA to remove all the parts, send them to Alabama to be fixed, and then send them back to me. I thanked him, with no intention of doing so.
De-Installation
I decided enough was enough with the oversized alternator. I didn’t want the damn thing in the first place. It caught fire. It cost me $700 in parts to make work, and then those parts didn’t work. It was made by a company that was clearly mid-enshittify, and relying on Balmar for a critical system like my alternator was not going to help me sleep at night.
Lucky for me, the stock Yanmar alternator, water pump pulley, and even a few stock belts were all tucked away in a box under the quarterberth. Seriously, miracles do happen. Removing the Balmar alternator surfaced another fun complication:
I don’t know when or why this was done, but there was no way the stock alternator was going back on tight with just a bolt. Then again, neither was the larger Balmar unit, which was held in place with a galvanized turnbuckle from a screen door…
Call To Hodges Marine
I do need to give Hodges credit; Balmar pushed pretty hard on the “RMA for repair” as the only solution, and Hodges bit the bullet for me. It took me a few calls but they agreed to take the RMA over from Balmar and refund my purchase, which was awesome - thanks gang!
Re-Installation
I pieced together a new pivot with a 5" long, 1/2" stainless steel bolt, 4 nuts, and 4 fender washers. When the nuts were tightened up against the washers it forced the bolt into a rigid 90 degrees from the block, holding the alternator right where i needed it.
A $7 alternator connector from Amazon repaired the cut-up wiring harness. The pulleys went on with zero drama, and with that the massive box of Balmar headache was replaced with a simple, effective set of parts. That was it.
So What About Backup Generation?
For the next few months, I am going to press the current production system hard to understand what my backup needs really are. Defiant has an obscene amount of storage, and that really opens up options for how power is budgeted.
I have a feeling a small, multi-source 4Kw generator running off propane will be the solution. I carry LP already for cooking, and it is available pretty much everywhere. If I can find one generating DC without an inverter, that’s an even smaller footprint - and might be something I can install permanently.
My Takeaway
It is easy to Monday morning quarterback this one. Had I known that the swap back to stock was going to be so painless (even with the mangled pivot mount on the block), I never would have considered all the Balmar acrobatics. This could also have gone the opposite direction - Balmar could have been the company they once were, and with quality products and quality support I might have decided to keep my engine as my backup generator. In the end I am much happier with a more simple power plant, easier to source replacement parts, and confidence in the equipment onboard.
