Today, Dave decided to run the water maker (WM) after it had been sitting for 4 months. Once it was running, we would take our first showers in 5 days. 4 months ago, we ran “pickling juice” through the lines to avoid any growth in the lines. When Dave tried to run the WM, it kept blowing the circuit breaker. He had to tear apart our dinette area to get to the pumps. I heard lots of swearing and then rummaging in our aft cabin, aka our garage. The boost pump didn’t appear to be working, so he bypassed it with a pump that we had removed from our forward shower, but was still in good condition. The system ran with the shower pump. So he removed the boost pump and found corrosion on the brass area (another issue). The pump ran fine when not hooked into the WM system. He put it back in and it wouldn’t run. This is where Dave said the Gremlins hiding in our boat like to take over just to confuse the issue. Dave did notice that with the cap of the impeller loose, the WM ran, with it tight, it wouldn’t. So he tried to do some adjusting with the cap, replaced it, and it ran!! We took our showers after about 6 hours of Dave working on this. When we were done making clean water, we had to flush the sea water out of the system. Now it stopped working again. So Dave just loosened the cap for it to work during this process. If he left it loose, water would eventually leak in this area. The plan was to call the company in the morning. After we had dinner, Dave was looking though the WM’s manual in the technical information area to check on ordering filters. Here was a little note written “if you don’t use the WM for extended periods of time, the impeller may stick to the cap. You should remove the cap and impeller and clean any residue before replacing them.” Well, if it had been in the “trouble shooting” area of the manual, it would have saved Dave about 5 hours of work.
At least it’s running, the lines didn’t stink, so the pickling must have done it’s job. And Dave said this was some of the purest water we have made with our water maker. He still plans to replace the filters and recheck everything.
While Dave was doing all this, I was updating my blog, reading a book, or cooking meals and doing dishes. All in all, it was a lazy day for me.
doing my part |
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