It’s been a very frustrating week. While I got the watermaker working briefly,
it failed again a couple of days later.
It would not come up to full pressure and there were air bubbles in the
flow meter. Another conference with Rich
(who was vacationing in Italy
and still called me back!) led me to rechecking for leaks on the intake side of
the boost pump. Sure enough, there were
some small leaks I hadn’t seen before.
Several days of swapping fittings, cranking down hose clamps with a
wrench, double clamping, trying better pipe tape, replacing an o-ring in the
strainer, and even reconfiguring the hoses a bit failed to stop the leaks. They sometimes got better or moved from one
place to another, but they never stopped completely. About all that’s left to try is checking the ¾ in. hose on various other barb fittings, seeing if 5/8
in. hose will fit on the 3/4 barbs after warming the hose with the heat gun, replacing some of the plastic fittings with
bronze, and getting an expensive bronze strainer. I’ll try the simpler/cheaper fixes
first. Not much choice at this
point. Air sucked in through these
little leaks can cause the pressure release valve to remain open even at normal
pressures, so I’ll need to check that too once I get the leaks stopped. In the meantime, I’ll have to keep freshwater
flushing the system every few days because I can’t pickle the system without
watermaker quality water. Catch 22!! If I get desperate, I’ll buy 5 gallons of distilled water.
While waiting for high tide to test the system at various
times this week, I made a bit of progress in finding new places for things
displaced from the engine room by the watermaker. The flopper stoppers got moved to the opposite
side of the engine room and are now strapped against the holding tank. The spare anchor is now stowed on deck on the
port quarter. I opened up the old stuck
fuel transfer pump that came with the boat and found it too rusted up to be worth working on, so it got
dumped. I also dug out an ancient Oberdorfer water pump that might have been for the old generator that I got rid of years ago. That pump got dumped too, as I couldn't even give it away.
My one small victory was getting the manual bilge pump to
work. I hope next week is better!!
sweet troubleshooting
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