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Larry

Jeff wrote in news:S7adnfFbO5U-
:

The pump shouldn't cycle at all. Normally, ours is tight and never
cycles, and the accumulator will even hold a bit of pressure after the
pump has been off for a week. (I'm actually headed to the boat this
morning to track down a leak suspected in the shower faucet.)

Yeah, but Roger has no accumulator to provide pressure to the system.
His is always hydrolocked making the pump cycle something awful unless
the faucets are wide open.

Roger you need an accumulator and will be amazed how much smoother the
water flow is and how little that pump cycles, saving the expensive pump
in the process. Make sure the T in the hose is on the BOTTOM of the
tank. The tank is supposed to have an air bubble. That's what makes it
work. I find them install upside down, even by boatyards who should know
better.

Your leak shouldn't be hard to find. Are you sure your bilge pump just
didn't empty the water out of the bilge, like it's supposed to do, when
the little water tank emptied?

If you suspect the heat exchanger of being the source of the leak, it's
easy to find, too. Just pull the hoses off the hot water tank from the
engine and let the tubing drain. Turn on the pump with the water tank
refilled and watch the fittings on the water tank to see if water comes
out. I doubt this is your problem. Is your engine cooling system all
raw water?? In a heat exchanger cooled engine, the hot water tank is
plumbed into the engine side full of antifreeze, not the seawater side
which doesn't get that hot. If you pumped the engine full of water from
a cracked hot water heater in a seawater cooled system, I'm sure it would
have flooded the engine exhaust by now.

More suspect is all that plastic tubing throughout the boat we call a
water system. It splits and cracks and stupids at the boatyard forget to
put hose clamps on it eventually leading to a hose coming loose to make a
mess for the bilge pump to clean up.

Just fill the water tank and turn the pump back on....should be easy to
spot if it emptied a full water tank before. Without an accumulator, and
no place to store pressure the accumulator provides, your water system
pump will cycle every few minutes to an hour....depending on the
hysteresis of the pressure switch and how much water leaks back through
the pump flapper valves, those little rubber disks they use for valves in
any water pump.

That cycling drives me crazy without an accumulator. How do you stand
it?