camdunning
Veteran Member
Hi All,
Hoping to get some sage wisdom from the experienced boaters on here. I have a whale water pump system on my boat with an accumulator tank. I don't know much about it, but I know that the pump kicks on when it senses the water is low to top up the accumulator tank.
Recently, we have been having issues with our house batteries not being able to maintain 12v very well. They're only 2.5 years old, but they've seen some heavy use since we live aboard and have had a handful of instances where we drew them down fully (which I understand decreases their shelf life quite a bit). Also one of the batteries needed fluids, which I didn't realize for quite a while. I'm planning on replacing them this weekend, just need to wrap my head around the finances of it.
The question is, when doing things like washing dishes which involves repeated on/off of the water system, the water pump will occasionally stop working for something like 30 seconds at a time before kicking back in to build the pressure back up. If we have to do a lot of dishes, it will happen regularly. We don't have the same issue with the shower, which will maintain pressure without interruption the whole time. My assumption here is that this is tied to battery issue - that the pump needs a burst of 12v to kick on, but can maintain pressure once its running with less power. With the batteries low, it has a hard time kicking on with the repeated on/off of doing dishes.
Does this seem like a reasonable assessment? I'm hoping that the battery replacement will fix our water issue and that there isn't something larger (and more expensive) wrong with our water system. Also, we have fixed the issue of regularly drawing down the batteries so hopefully this won't repeat itself in the future.
Thanks for the help!
Hoping to get some sage wisdom from the experienced boaters on here. I have a whale water pump system on my boat with an accumulator tank. I don't know much about it, but I know that the pump kicks on when it senses the water is low to top up the accumulator tank.
Recently, we have been having issues with our house batteries not being able to maintain 12v very well. They're only 2.5 years old, but they've seen some heavy use since we live aboard and have had a handful of instances where we drew them down fully (which I understand decreases their shelf life quite a bit). Also one of the batteries needed fluids, which I didn't realize for quite a while. I'm planning on replacing them this weekend, just need to wrap my head around the finances of it.
The question is, when doing things like washing dishes which involves repeated on/off of the water system, the water pump will occasionally stop working for something like 30 seconds at a time before kicking back in to build the pressure back up. If we have to do a lot of dishes, it will happen regularly. We don't have the same issue with the shower, which will maintain pressure without interruption the whole time. My assumption here is that this is tied to battery issue - that the pump needs a burst of 12v to kick on, but can maintain pressure once its running with less power. With the batteries low, it has a hard time kicking on with the repeated on/off of doing dishes.
Does this seem like a reasonable assessment? I'm hoping that the battery replacement will fix our water issue and that there isn't something larger (and more expensive) wrong with our water system. Also, we have fixed the issue of regularly drawing down the batteries so hopefully this won't repeat itself in the future.
Thanks for the help!