I was called to check out a 32 Cruiser the other day. The owner had cleaned the airconditioner strainer and didn't tighten the lid properly when he left on Friday, it wasn't leaking that bad, just a good dribble(we found the leak later). When I got there on the following Monday, it had 6 inches of salt water above the salon floor, water was up to the bottom of the manifolds of the engines. I had three 2000 gph pumps, all with independant float switches. One pump was bad, one pump had a bad float switch, the other pump couldn't keep up with the water leak. The water had gotten high enough to short out the battery charger, the last pump had run the house batteries dead. We turned on all the bilge pump switches, none were pumping because of the dead batteries, luckily the engine batteries were still hot. I jumped the engine battery to the house and got two pumps runnning, we added a 3500 gph 110 volt emergency pump plugged into shore power. We were able to shut off all the seacocks, not knowing what was leaking. After about an hour, I think the water had dropped 6 inches, I was able to pull the hose off of the port engine seacock and stuck in the bilge, we fired the engine up and used the engines raw water pump as a "crash pump" and pumped the rest of the water out in no time. So far, this guy has spent about $7000 fixing problems that have come up since then from the salt water intrusion. I can't believe the genset is still working. POint of the story is, bilge pumps are lucky to pump 1/3 of their rating in real world conditions, and they are allways subject to failure and or dead batteries if left unattended. I'm finding they usually only have about a three to four year life span on average. I'd tell your buddy to replace all his pumps with bigger ones, and replace the float switches as well(make sure to use high amp ones)
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10-29-2009, 07:27 AM
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