Five days ago the water stopped working. The temporary solution was that we had a hose from the dock into the boat, so we kind of had water, but nothing from the taps. Doesn’t feel like a home without water from the taps.
I took one of my 3 identical not working Aqua-Jet water pumps to my favorite hardware store guy, and he said he would try to fix it. The pressure sensor had stopped working, which is a 50 euro replacement part on a 300 euro ($450 Canadian) pump. When I was talking to him showed me the pressure sensor, which is the one in the main blog post picture. He actually had the important part in stock! And it cost only 2 euros!
After I left I thought: if he can fix it, why can’t I? After I got back to the boat, I took out the other broken pump and started to take the pressure sensor apart.
I had taken these off before, looking for anything obviously wrong to fix, and I was familiar with all the internal parts, but I had never seen the pressure sensor I was shown. I starting poking it and noticed that part of the inside was rubber, so I started to pull at the rubber……and it started to come out. I had found where the pressure sensor was buried!
I was pretty excited about this, and I mentioned it to the owner of my favorite drinking place that night while getting a beer….he was surprisingly knowledgeable and he told me where to go to get a replacement…..so this morning I went shopping for a list of parts that I needed.
I got almost the identical part (it had a swing-arm over the pressure sensor that we had to cut off) but I got 5 of them at 2 euros each, 2 re-settable 8 ohm fuses (I didn’t have a small fuse for the pump before but the circuit does have a circuit breaker), and a bunch of other parts to make a little lab setup.
I had to fiddle a bit to get the new pressure switch inside the housing, and it seemed a bit stiffer to me than the old one which worried me, but I checked the spec-sheet and indeed they were identical parts.
After I had everything together I setup my workbench to test the pump:
I had 24V cables connected to my house batteries, water in a bucket and for the first time I used my clamp-meter to check the amps being drawn by the pump. I was pretty sure that something was making it pull too many amps before which fried the little internal switch so I wanted to keep an eye on the amps. (BTW I suspect a bad connector that I replaced.)
Anyway it all worked! I installed the pump and we now have water!!!
Let’s see how long this repair lasts. Good news is I have a breaker on the pump so the breaker should go before the poor little switch inside gets burnt out…..but we will see.
The other benefit is that I can put away all of my tools and stuff which makes the inside of the boat very messy. You have no idea how much Victoria loves it when the boat is messy!
Hopefully my next post will not be about fixing anything and will be about how amazing somewhere is 😉
The other sad thing to consider is how many perfectly good pumps get thrown away because of a broken 2 euro sensor. A horrible waste.
Adventures on Spruzzo 