Brief Description: Planning, labeling and installing circuit breakers
As part of the electrical system upgrade Pipistrel provides under warranty, they gave me a new breaker panel. This panel used regular incandescent engine lane warning lights. The old panel used LEDs. I much prefer LEDs and I checked the part number on the old LED warning lights and they have a resistor already in the LED mount, so the will work as a direct replacement. I took the LED warning lights off the old panel and replaced the incandescent lights on the new panel. Pipistrel provides bus bars for three rows of breakers so I put all my avionics breakers on the first row so one bus bar can span the entire row and then put the one remaining breaker on the second row leaving room for avionics expansion on the second row. I then put the pitot, trim and cockpit light breakers on the bottom row. They will connect to the main master bus not the avionics bus so they will have their own bus bar. Pipistrel also provides an “always on” white power wire that I will connect to the cockpit light so I can turn this on with the rest of the aircraft power turned off. Because I added a tail strobe light, the switched breaker for the nav lights was not big enough to handle the current so I switched it with the 8 amp “power socket” breaker. I created a Excel spread sheet table of all the power loads on the system and I am getting close to the 27 amp limit of the generator (for average current draw, peak draw is over 30 amps) so limiting the “power socket” even more is beneficial.
