While on the old panel all the fuses were on the panel itself, the new panel has only the rocker switches that are fused so we had to do some extra rewiring work, which was very much needed anyway to clean up the mess. We installed a new slightly larger plywood over the small plywood that was glued to the the hull, to accommodate the two new fuse boxes and the new busbar. One fuse box for all the circuits that doesn't require a switch on the panel, like the interior lights, and an other one for those that lead to the panel but where the switch is switching more than one circuit at the same time, like the NMEA 2000 power and navigation. Those circuits got separate fuses too. We also installed a new negative busbar from BEP (Zbus) with 18 terminals as the new panel has only positive connections. We did some cleanup in the wiring and tried to label everything as well. We used a cheap cable collector from Jula to help leading the wires together with the option to quickly remove if it
The project for the cold and dark winter nights is to remove the old self-polishing bottom paint and prepare the hull for the 2-component epoxy barrier coat and a new hard anti-fouling. We're using the Pro Scraper which has a vacuum attachment. It makes removing the paint almost completely dust free. Still it's a very time consuming and hard job, but we're almost done with the port side. We skip the keel for now and will return to it when the weather gets warmer as it needs to be treated shortly after the paint is removed.