I was out on a houseboat with a group of friends over the long Labor Day weekend. You'd think the control panels on a rental houseboat would be designed so someone unfamiliar with them could figure them out without training or a manual. And you'd be wrong. Just to get power to operate the electrical system, you needed to go to the back of the boat where the generator control panel is, turn on the blower for a minute, turn it off, hold down the on switch while pressing the start button, wait for it to warm up for a minute, then switch a dial over to "boat power".But the real UI travesty was the engine blower. The blower is there to air out the engine compartment of any built up gas fumes, which could otherwise ignite in a massive conflagration. The problem is, the blower runs continuously when the switch is on, pulling power from not the boat's generator, but from the starter battery. There's no indication that the blower is on other than the position of the switch: no light, no warning beep, and not even a mechanical hum. So it's far too easy to accidentally leave the blower on and drain the starter battery. Which we did. 9 miles from the marina.
Luckily the rental company had the policy of sending a mechanic out to deal with any boat problems. The guy was fast, and for good reason; he's had a ton of practice. We were the 3rd boat that day that needed a jump start. All because of that poorly-designed blower switch.
Problem solver that I am, I decided the best way to solve this problem would be to install timer switches on the blower circuit. You've probably seen these on hot tubs or saunas, where they want to limit the amount of time the heater is on for safety reasons. It wouldn't cost more than a few hundred dollars to outfit the whole fleet with these, and they would save a ton of hassle for their mechanics, not to mention the gas to drive a boat out the stranded renters.
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