Hello, John Talley here with boats.net. Today we're going to spend a little bit of time
talking about well, troubleshooting and testing bilge pump systems.
Now the real trick about this is no matter what boat you're on, chances are the bilge pump and or
the switch float are going to be in the lowest, most nasty part of the boat available because
that's their job: they're supposed to be down at the lowest part of the boat so they can extract
the most amount of water should it come aboard. Now the trick is some of these places you won't
even be able to get to, so what do you do if you want to make sure that your
bilge pump system is working or it's not and you need to troubleshoot it? Well in this video,
we're going to lay out a couple of different examples and I'm going to try to give you enough
pointers to where you can pick yours apart. So if you're ready, we'll dive into this.
So what we have here in scenario number one is a battery, a three-way switch, a float level switch,
and the actual bilge pump itself. Now the way this is configured,
in the run position you lift up on the switch and it activates, put it in the middle position
it's not going to do anything, bring it down in the momentary location and
you can manually activate it. Now that is the way it's supposed to operate.
Now given this particular configuration, how would you go about troubleshooting it just from up here,
not having to go all the way down into the bowels? Well there's a couple of different things you can
do. Now the first place that you want to check if it's not functioning at all is to make sure you've
got battery power. Don't make this harder than it needs to be. It should have either a circuit
breaker or a fuse and you want to make sure that it is the right ampacity and that it is not blown.
Now there's a couple of different ways you can check that. You can either a use a test light--
what you want to do is test on the load side of it, so that's going to be right there.
That's the battery side, goes through the filament, and then out to the load.
So what you're going to look for, here's your input coming into the switch. You're
going to have a momentary output here, and then an on output over here. So let's put it
in the on position see if I'm right. Yes, see that is heading directly over to the switch.
So we know it's there. Now if we want to test the output to the motor
if it were not operating, you go to the other side of that switch and just momentarily push
it. Alright that is going to tell you that your your switch is doing what it's supposed to do.
So for the rest of this test, we're going to take out our fuse so we can just look at the
resistance values going back and through both the bilge pump and the switch itself. Now the
first thing we want to look for to see if the wiring is complete and is actually going through
the pump itself or it's going to be available to send the power through the pump itself.
Now the way that we need to find these two wires or the resistance as you follow these back,
that is going to be in between our black and our green. With it disconnected,
we're doing-- well actually we don't even have to worry about switching it on.
But we want to look in between black and green. and what we're
looking for is the resistance of the motor itself. And it's going to be under an ohm.
0.5. I can believe that. See what our
flat resistance is, 0.2, 0.1. So, I can believe that. So the windings inside this is right at 0.5
of an ohm. Next, if you can actually get a stick or your hand or whatever to activate the switch
that would be looking in between white and green. So we'll put that in our sound verification.
Let's see. So that would tell me that yes,
the switch is working. Now unfortunately there's no other way to test the switch
unless you move it up and down, and that may mean getting into a tight tight place to pull that off.
But at least you can connect your wires up top
instead of having to go down below. The other advantage is this is a completely sealed wiring
system. I've used the correct connectors, everything is heat shrunk, it is completely
sealed up. If you start poking into this wire to do testing, guess what? You've just made a hole
for water to come in-- salt water-- and it will eat that wire alive in no time at all.
But with this scenario, you can take a look see if it sees the motor, and if by chance you can get
something just to lift up that switch to activate it? Your meter is going to verify two things: one,
that the switch is working, and two, that the cabling going down to it is working as well.
The trick is to know how your system is wired. That way you know which wire to go
to in order to test either going through the motor or through the switch itself.
Next, we're going to bring in a two-way switch with a setup where it's actually an automatic
bilge pump, and that means the switch is on the inside of the pump. so let me get it set
up and we'll take a look at that one next. All right guys, with this one it's a little
bit simpler. It operates a little bit differently as well. This uses just a regular on/off switch
to trigger it in the manual mode. Now this particular switch, it is actually a rocker type.
I would probably suggest going to a momentary to run it manually, and then it would release.
Now the way this one gets powered, it is hard wired going through the switch
back to the pump to where you cannot shut it off. And for the most part that is great for
people that are absent-minded and may forget to turn their bilge pumps in the run position,
especially at night when you're asleep. Something may go wrong. It can end up ending poorly.
But with this system, it's constant hot back to the switch so it's ready to go.
So how do you test this configuration? Well just like the previous example,
go to your source first. Make sure that your fuse is good to go just like you did on the other.
Make sure it's of course got power coming in and then especially on the load side. Because the load
side, that's the side that counts. Now on our switch itself, you see the power is coming in,
you can see where the power is hardwired. That's telling me that switch is on that side. So that's
where it's getting its power once that switch closes on the inside to turn on the motor itself.
This side, that should be your manual mode. So putting a test light there,
yep, there it is. Of course there's your power.
And this is just a common ground, which also allows that light to operate.
So we verified we have a good battery voltage, we've got a good fuse,
and our switch is doing what it's supposed to do. Now how do we look through those wires
to see what's going on with the motor? This one's going to be a little bit tougher.
Let's take our fuse out. So what we're going to try to do is measure from the negative side
back to the manual side of the motor itself. So that's going to be white to our negative.
0.5,.6 that's about what we expected to see. Now here's the real trick. This one
Thas an internal switch that you can't even activate even if you spin it upside down. But
if you can actually get your hand down to this particular pump, it has a very interesting option.
Right back here it has a touch point. If you hold it for five seconds, it will run it for three. You
don't have any buttons to push. You just get your finger right onto that dot, hold for five seconds,
then she runs. Really nice feature that the Rulemate has on this particular model.
Now there's really no other way to test this one other than to activate it manually,
and then test the switch on the side. They basically accomplish the same thing.
Now the only way I know that we can really test that float switch
is either a fill your bilge up with water, which I do not recommend,
or B, let's get a test bucket and just submerge it inside of there just to make
sure it's activating... which I just happen to have over here. So let's watch it operate.
Now hopefully you've got enough room to where you can actually access yours
and then submerge it into some water. Now when you first put it in the water it's going to take
about a second and a half, two seconds before it activates and then it's going to run for another
three or four at least. So just be prepared for that. See if we do this with a minimum of a mess.
There she goes. So like I said,
just be prepared for it not to immediately start pumping. You have to wait a couple of seconds.
One more time, let's go.
I counted four. Jacuzzi!
Well all right guys, there you go. Just a few simple things you can look at.
Just to do some initial testing on yours, and hopefully you don't have to go all the way
down to it and put it in a bucket of water just to make sure it's working correctly.
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