Egis 4710-20 20A Push-To-Reset Panel Breaker

The Egis Mobile Electric 4710-20 is a 20-amp push-to-reset circuit breaker made to mount right into your helm panel or a dedicated distribution board. It protects a single circuit, and when that circuit pulls more current than it should, the breaker trips and the button pops out to open the circuit. You push it back in to reset. No fuse to dig out of a drawer, no spare to hunt for at 2 AM. That's the whole appeal of a push-to-reset breaker over a plain fuse, and it's why a lot of boaters switch over once they've been caught short offshore.

It's rated for 50 volts DC, which covers just about any DC system you'll run on a boat. 12-volt house and start circuits, 24-volt systems on bigger boats, and the 32 or 42-volt setups you see on some specialty rigs. That 50-volt ceiling gives you headroom on all of them. We size a breaker to the wire and the load, not the system voltage, so the 20-amp rating is the number you match to your circuit.

A 20-amp breaker lands in a useful spot on a boat. It's the right size for a lot of accessory circuits, things like a bank of cabin lights, a livewell pump, a windlass control circuit, a stereo amp, or a run of accessory outlets. Anything that pulls a steady load in that range and deserves its own protection is a candidate. Give each circuit its own breaker instead of ganging loads together, and troubleshooting a fault gets a whole lot easier down the road.

For a 20-amp circuit, 14-gauge wire is the practical minimum in most marine runs, and we'd step up to 12-gauge on longer runs where voltage drop starts to matter. Keep the breaker close to the source of power it protects. This breaker guards the downstream wiring, so match its rating to the smallest conductor in the circuit and you're covered.

Installation is straightforward. It's a panel-mount unit, so you drill the hole, drop it through, and snug it down with the included knurled nut and palnut. The stainless steel hardware holds up to salt air and won't rust out on you. Connections are screw terminals, which we prefer over push-on tabs for anything that sees vibration. A screw terminal with a proper ring or fork lug stays put when the boat's pounding through a chop, and that matters more than folks think until a loose spade tab leaves them chasing a phantom fault.

The front of the breaker carries an IP40 rating, so it keeps out fingers and small debris where it faces the cabin or console. The back is IP00, meaning the terminals are exposed and need to live behind the panel or inside an enclosure. If you're mounting it somewhere it could catch spray, add a sealing boot over the button. That boot is sold separately, it's not in the box. Operating temperature runs from 14 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit, so it handles cold early-season mornings and warm engine spaces alike.

It carries a UL1500 listing, so you know it's been tested for the job it's doing. One more nice touch is the button itself. A tripped breaker leaves its button popped out, so you get a clear visual of exactly which circuit faulted and can walk the panel to spot it at a glance instead of pulling fuses one at a time. This is the kind of part you wire in once and forget about. If you're building out a switch panel, adding accessory circuits, or replacing a tired old fuse block with something you can reset by hand, the 4710-20 is a clean, no-drama choice. Not sure on amp sizing for your circuit? We're happy to talk it through before you order.