Egis 4730-40 Short Stop 40A Manual Reset Breaker

The Egis Mobile Electric Short Stop is a 40-amp manual-reset circuit breaker built for the kind of DC wiring you'll find on any serious boat. It protects a single circuit rated up to 40 amps, and when it trips, it stays tripped until you push the button back in yourself. That's the whole idea behind a Type 3 breaker. No guessing whether a fault cleared on its own. You know it's clear, because you reset it.

Why does that matter out on the water? An auto-reset breaker cycles power back on the moment it cools down, which is fine for something like a horn but not what you want feeding a bilge pump, a windlass, or an electronics bus. If there's a real short, you want the circuit to stay dead until you've found the problem and fixed it. Manual reset gives you that. Push the little button on top and the circuit is live again once you've sorted the fault.

It's rated for 28 volts DC, so it covers both 12-volt and 24-volt systems with plenty of headroom. The 40-amp rating is the trip point. As a rule of thumb you size the breaker to protect the wire, not the load, so match it to the ampacity of the cable you're running. On a typical marine install a 40-amp breaker pairs with 8-gauge wire on a short run. Check your own wire chart and account for run length and ambient temperature before you commit to a gauge.

The build is what you'd expect from gear meant to live in a wet, salty, vibrating environment. It carries an IP66 protection rating, which means it's dust-tight and sealed against powerful water jets from any direction. The operating range runs from -40 to 185 degrees Fahrenheit, so it won't quit on you in a January delivery or bolted next to a hot engine block. All the mounting and terminal hardware is stainless steel, which is the only thing that makes sense within splash range of salt water.

Connections land on a single No. 10-32 stud terminal, so you're crimping a ring terminal and torquing it down with a nut, not fighting a spade connector that can back out under vibration. That stud setup is one of the reasons these hold up on engine-room panels and battery-bank distribution. The orange housing is Egis's color code for the 40-amp rating in this Short Stop series, which makes it easy to spot the right value at a glance when you've got a row of them on a panel.

On a properly wired boat, every circuit leaving the battery or a distribution bus should have overcurrent protection close to its source, and that's exactly the role this breaker fills. Fit it at the panel or right off the bus bar so a chafed wire or a shorted accessory can't dump the whole battery through a length of cable. Because it resets by hand, you also get a built-in switch. Flip a circuit off for service by tripping the breaker, and there's no fuse to lose in the bilge.

Where does it go? Anywhere you'd otherwise drop in a fuse but want the convenience of resetting instead of carrying spares. Trolling motor feeds, electronics, accessory circuits, pumps, lighting runs, inverters, and small winches are all fair game as long as the load sits within the 40-amp rating. Egis Mobile Electric has been building electrical protection for marine and specialty-vehicle use for over 25 years, and the Short Stop line is their bread-and-butter panel breaker. It's a simple, honest part that does one job and does it for a long time.

One thing worth saying plainly: this is a single breaker, not a kit. You're getting the breaker with its stainless hardware, and you supply the wire and ring terminals. Mount it where you can reach the reset button without contortions, keep the terminal connections clean, tight, and protected from standing water, and it'll ride out season after season. If you're not sure what amperage your circuit needs, size to the wire and the load, and when in doubt call us. We wire these in all the time.