HMV Barn Project

[Nowhere-Man]

All I need is a new 15 amp fuse and the inverter ought to work and charge my batteries.

I wonder why the 15 amp fuse blew, it maybe worth a careful investigation.

You must have some means of isolating the mains "shore power" when the boats 240v AC sockets are being supplied by the inverter. As it is a Charger/inverter it may have an automatic changeover switch built in.
In which case it makes sense to take the rest of the boats mains wiring from the change over switch.

I would find out the make and model of the charger/inverter, get hold of the installation instructions and follow the wiring instructions for that specific device.
I have rewired a few boats I have owned including my first boat, a Colvic motorsailor which I built in the 1980's from the bare mouldings.
Mike

I'd say the inverter is a nineties device. It draws about 6 amps off-load. It was made in Taiwan and, yes, I have the booklet. The manual makes it very simple and shows the inverter/charger simply plugged into mains as you would any car battery charger. Two heavy duty leads run to the batteries and charge by trickle or fast charge. Should you not have a mains supply (Power cut), you can switch the inverter itself on and it will then supply 250 AC just from the car batteries.

I'm really not sure why the shore supply was fed directly to the inverter. This must have been the case because when the fuse blew, that totally cut off my supply. I had no shoreline or anything. So, I removed the existing cables to the consumer RCD, fitted a new one with arctic cable and then ran the other end of that to the shoreline socket. That restored power. Direct connection to supply.

I now have removed the inverter but to do that I had to dismantle lots of cable. It had to be removed from the battery selector switch to free up enough play to draw the unit out of a cupboard. The fuse was a 15 amp one in a small socket at the back. It was blown out.

I have no DC at the moment as I plan on redoing the whole lot. I just bought fuses and will test the inverter tomorrow and see if it works.

I'm not going to be too critical of the sparky who wired this up but, based on experience, I'd recommend easy access to inverters and I wouldn't let my entire supply depend upon one 15 amp fuse. Maybe you'd expect the RCD to have tripped first but, for whatever reason it didn't. The fuse did but access involved a lot of dismantling as it was cabled into a cupboard very tightly. Had the MCB tripped, it would have been simple.