Watery Woes

Houston, We Have a Problem

Thurrrup, thurrrup, thurrrup. Damn. It's 2AM and the fresh water pump is cycling. Again. What the heck is that all about? The good news is that it's only a short pulse. The bad news is that it's enough to wake me up. I've tried ignoring it (my first reaction to problems), but it hasn't gone away. Since we are currently moored in a beautiful spot for a week, I can now ignore that beauty and get sweaty trying to fix this problem. Yay!

The beautiful city of St. Augustine at twilight

Once again, it's me against the beast. The beast is any problem that defies a simple explanation. I've had a few of these smile their evil, toothy grins at me - just daring me to come near. While I'm likely to vanquish the beast, it's rarely done without evidence left on my body somewhere. Those are sharp teeth!

This occasion wouldn't be any different as it happens.

Step 1: Get Help

Now, it used to be that I'd just jump in and figure everything out myself. Unfortunately, that usually turned out to be the most expensive option. This time, I documented the problem as much as I could and put it up on the Yahoo group forum for boats just like mine. This inevitably leads to many sympathetic voices suggesting every conceivable problem and solution, so you have to pick and choose which voices to listen to. They're the one place I'm likely to find sympathy and a shoulder to cry on. My wife and daughter have only the vaguest notions of the miracles I perform to keep this boat floating.

Step 2: Isolate the Problem

The freshwater pump takes water out of a large tank and pressurizes it to 44 PSI and sends it through hard plastic lines that worm their way throughout the boat where you can't see them. The pump has a pressure switch, once the lines are pressurized, they shut off. What I was hearing was a short pulse of the pump because the sensor measured a pressure decrease. Simple, right? The first thing to look for is a water leak somewhere in all those lines.

Step3: Clean the Bilges

All boats have bilges. It's where water goes that shouldn't be in the boat. Since time immemorial this has been a problem. I think it was some Carthaginian, out for a Zeusday sail in his trireme, who first accidentally dropped his favorite discus and watched it roll underneath the slave rowers. "Zeus damn!" he exclaimed as he blindly reached underneath the floorboards, franticly searching. He didn't find his discus, but he did find something squishy and disgusting, causing him to retch. It turns out the Carthaginian word for, "blech!" translates into the English, "bilge." Look it up if you don't believe me. 

So, my bilges needed to be cleaned and dried if they were going to help me identify where the leak was. This technique had worked in the past, so I had some hope for it. Turns out it was misplaced...

Step4: Block the Water

After spending a day with the bilges open everywhere on the boat, and crawling around with a paper towel to make sure they were really dry, I determined that the mystery water leak wasn't playing by the rules. Water was not winding up in them. Now I would have to try something more difficult. I had to block off each section of the freshwater system to see if it would stop the pulsing (which had progressed to once every 5 minutes).  

How do you block 44 PSI? I can tell you what not to do. Don't carve a piece of cork and stick it in and tape it. That resulted in the cork whizzing past my face at subsonic velocities - followed by a stream of pressurized water that splashed onto my laptop. Also, don't use a large metal bolt that almost fits the hose. It turns out you can't just put a lot more tape on it to seal it. While it held for one second longer than the first attempt, the net result was the same. At least when the water came gushing out, it only went all over the innards of the air conditioner, which is in the same area.

Once I had a length of tubing with a non-lethal seal on one end, I got to work going around the boat and replacing connections with the blocker. This sounds easy, but this is where most of my scars came to pass. While a few of the connections are easily reachable, many are placed where only garden gnomes could possibly go. Invariably, I could only reach these connections with one hand, with the rest of my body inconveniently leaning on a sharp fiberglass panel. While disconnecting the connection worked one-handed, it was another thing to get the two pieces back together. 

Remember the dry bilges? Well they were rapidly filling with water (mixed in some cases with my precious blood). Every test involved a liberal spray of water released into the nether regions of the boat. You'd hope this was all for a good purpose. As it turned out, it wasn't.

Step5: Try the Spare Pump

All that mucking about with blocking off parts of the water system got me no where. All I could say was that if I had the blocker attached to the output of the pump, the cycling totally stopped. As soon as I added more of the system to the pump, the cycling started and I couldn't see any sign of water leaking anywhere. It had to be the pump!

I put the spare pump in the system and it seems even worse! OK, it can't be the pump, it must be the freakin hoses! I half-heartedly try to go through the entire isolation process with the new pump, with basically the same result as before. Did I mention this is day #2 that I've dedicated to this process? Where are the girls you ask? Oh, they are enjoying cookies and cake over at the relatives, where they've been for the last two days...

Step6: Give Up

I usually try this step sooner, not sure why I waited as long as I did. I was defeated. I figured I'd put everything back the way it was and just live with it. Since the water wasn't showing up in the bilge, it was hard to prove I was actually losing any water. I convinced myself I could learn to enjoy the brief cycling of the water pump hour after hour, day after day. 

Any reasonable person would be frustrated at this point, I was no exception. In trying to get everything back together, I had one balky set of connections that every time I tried to turn on the pump, water would hiss and spray in one direction or another. After several attempts, I yanked at it a little too hard and broke the Zeuss-damn water pump!!

Step7: Smile

Because once I replaced the old water pump with the new water pump, everything worked perfectly and continues to this day. Sometimes finding the silver lining requires a bit of blood, sweat and tears, but if you're persistent, you'll find it!