Anybody using marine trip resettable circuit breakers

moparmat2000 said
Hi Redfish,

The ones i was looking at are a manual reset. If you ran your lights with relays and a fuse, when the fuse pops its like a manual reset breaker popping anyway, except you need to carry spare fuses. Either way your headlamps are gonna go out if theres a problem.

Yes, you want to wire the circuits with seperate circuit breakers for high and low beam. Thats the smart thing to do. I am just thinking about the issue of being out in the middle of nowhere, and not having spare fuses. Or burning em all up trying to figure out the problem while on the side of the road.

But you bring up a good point, is there a cycle life on them, and what is it? Does that depend on the brand? Obviously chinese ***** gonna prob fail faster, but at what rate? If your wiring is routed properly, and wrapped, how often is this issue really going to come up. I have seen some awful wiring jobs myself tho, so i guess it does.

Matt

Too many factors to state a number of cycles. Same applies to those manual reset breakers in your home panel.
Here's the thing... The headlight circuit itself wasn't fused at all from OEM. A serious fault should open the fusible link and stop the entire vehicle. Beyond that, The original headlight switch does have thermal protection built in. When those got weak from age or for whatever reason, you would be riding along and BAM lights out. There's a moment of panic, WTF, and the lights come on again. Those too would go total failure after some number of cycles. So... Add another similar devise to the circuit if you want. Which will open first ? How will you know which is the fault ?