A boat is a harder electrical environment than any building — constant vibration, salt air, a hull that moves, and no one to call when something fails offshore. We design and install Victron-based DC and AC systems for commercial vessels and pleasure yachts, built to ABYC standards with marine-grade tinned cable and UL listed distribution throughout.
Whether the vessel earns its keep or takes the family out on weekends, the wiring behind the panel is held to the same practice.
Workboats, charter and tour operators, research and survey vessels, fishing boats, and tenders. Uptime is revenue, so the priority is a system that keeps running and that a crew can diagnose without a specialist onboard.
Sail and power, coastal cruisers and liveaboards. The goal is a quiet boat — air conditioning, induction cooking, and a full night at anchor without the generator running or the neighbours complaining.
The American Boat & Yacht Council publishes the consensus safety standards for recreational vessel systems in the United States. Surveyors reference them, insurers ask about them, and yards that ignore them leave problems for whoever opens the panel next. We wire to them as a matter of course.
ABYC practice is a proper crimped, marine-rated terminal with adhesive-lined heat shrink. Solder alone makes a rigid spot in a conductor that vibrates for a living, and that is exactly where it eventually breaks.
Bare copper wicks salt moisture up under the insulation and corrodes out of sight, long before the connection visibly fails. Every conductor we pull is tinned, stranded, marine-grade cable.
Overcurrent protection belongs within inches of the battery or busbar it protects — not at the far end of the run. An unfused conductor between the bank and the panel is the most common serious fault we find on other people's work.
The cheapest part of any marine electrical job is the wire and the terminals. It is also the part that fails first when someone economises. We do not.
Tinned, finely stranded, marine-grade boat cable — UL 1426 listed and built for a wet, vibrating, salt-laden environment. Correct gauge for the load and the run length, sized for voltage drop rather than just ampacity.
Plus Ancor heat-shrink terminals, adhesive-lined shrink, chafe protection and cable clamps from the same range.
AC and DC distribution panels, busbars, fuse blocks, battery switches, and ANL/MRBF/Class-T fusing. UL listed components, with ignition-protected parts specified wherever the space calls for them.
Circuit-by-circuit breakers and engraved labels, so every load is identified and individually protected.
MultiPlus-II and Quattro inverter/chargers, Cerbo GX and GX Touch, Lynx distribution, Orion XS DC-DC, SmartShunt, SmartSolar MPPT, and Victron isolation transformers — one ecosystem that actually talks to itself.
We are a Victron integration specialist first; the marine work is that expertise applied to a hull.
Battery data belongs at the helm, not buried in a phone app you have to go find. A Cerbo GX bridges the whole Victron system onto your NMEA 2000 backbone, so state of charge and AC status sit on the same screen as depth, speed and chart.
The GX device is the translator. Everything Victron — inverter/charger, MPPT controllers, SmartShunt, tank and temperature senders — reports to the Cerbo over VE.Bus, VE.Direct and VE.Can. The Cerbo then publishes that data onto NMEA 2000 through a single drop cable into your existing backbone.
Exactly which fields appear depends on your MFD's software and how it renders N2K data, but on a typical install you get:
Victron's own GX Touch panel and the VRM portal show the full picture; the MFD shows the fields that matter while you are actually driving the boat.
NMEA 2000 is an open standard, so any compliant display can receive the data. In practice we work most often with:
Some MFDs also support Victron's app directly over the network, which gives a richer view than N2K fields alone. We will tell you honestly which route gives the better result on your particular display rather than promising every field on every screen.
The MFD covers you at the helm. The Cerbo also pushes everything to Victron's VRM portal over wifi, ethernet or a cellular modem — so you can check the bank from the dock, the office, or another hemisphere, and get an alarm on your phone when shore power drops or the bilge runs long. For boats that need logic rather than just visibility, we add Node-RED flows on the same device.
Victron released GX firmware v3.70 in February 2026, and a lot of it landed squarely in the marine column — digital switching you can drive from the helm, electric-propulsion support, and cell-level battery visibility. We build these in on new installs and retrofit them to systems already aboard.
The Marine MFD app now carries the switch pane. GX relays, third-party digital switches and Node-RED virtual switches can be viewed and operated straight from the chartplotter — so deck lights, pumps and the water heater are a touch away on the screen you're already using.
GX alarms are now transmitted onto NMEA 2000, and Garmin displays render them as alerts at the helm. A low bank, a lost shore connection or an inverter fault reaches the crew where they're standing rather than waiting in an app.
EmpirBus digital switching now appears in the switch pane on the GX and through the VRM remote console. Venus OS also natively supports Shelly Gen2-and-newer switches, energy meters and RGB controllers, plus Safiery STAR-Power, STAR-Light and STAR-Rover controllers over VE.Can for 12V and 24V circuits.
The GX Boat Page gains CANopen profiles alongside the existing NMEA 2000 path, covering Sevcon and Curtis motor controllers. Motor RPM, power, current, temperature and direction display on the GX, with dual-motor support, regeneration shown on the gauge, and a setting for inverted motor direction.
With a Lynx Smart BMS NG, the GX now shows each connected battery individually — down to per-cell voltages and cell temperatures. That turns "the bank seems off" into a specific module and a specific cell, which is the difference between a diagnosis and a guess.
Virtual switch types let a Node-RED flow surface as a real control in the switch pane — and now on the MFD. Input nodes also gained conditional evaluation, so a node can emit true/false when a value crosses a threshold and combine two conditions with AND/OR. "If state of charge drops below 20% and solar is flat, shed these circuits" is now a short flow.
Feature list per Victron's Venus OS 3.70 release announcement (25 February 2026). Which of these apply to your boat depends on the GX model and the hardware already aboard — we will tell you which are worth doing and which are not.
We take on the whole electrical scope or the part of it you need, and we are just as willing to survey what is already aboard and tell you honestly what should stay.
Moving off lead-acid properly — LiFePO₄ bank, BMS integration, alternator protection, charge-source configuration, and the low-temperature charging rules that people skip and then regret.
MultiPlus-II or Quattro installation, transfer switching, shore-power inlets and cordage, galvanic isolation or an isolation transformer, and a panel that handles the dock you actually tie up to.
Replacing tired panels and mystery wiring with Blue Sea distribution, correct fusing, proper busbars, and a labelled, documented layout that a surveyor can follow.
Solar on hardtops and biminis, high-output alternator and DC-DC charging, and Victron MPPT controllers — coordinated so every source charges the bank the way the BMS expects.
Cerbo GX, SmartShunt, tank and temperature senders, NMEA 2000 bridging to the helm, VRM enrollment, and custom Node-RED logic where the boat needs it.
An honest look at an existing system against ABYC practice — what is unsafe, what is merely untidy, and what is fine as it is. You get a written punch list, prioritised.
Vessel type and length, what you run at anchor, how you charge today, and what is frustrating you about the current system. That is enough for us to come back with a realistic approach and a budget range.
Based in Seattle and working throughout the Puget Sound and Salish Sea.