Thursday 7 January 2021 Demopolis,
AL
So, what’s the worst thing that
can break on a twin-engine gasoline powered houseboat on a delivery trip? Why the Vacuflush commode machinery in the ONLY
head on board, of course, especially when your slip is nearly a quarter mile
from the marina’s heads. You thought it
was something to do with the engines, didn’t you?
This casualty has stopped any
thoughts of moving the boat until it is corrected.
I was in town in the rental car
about to see if the local auto parts store carried a piezo-electric alarm I
could hook up to the firefighting gas bottle in the engine room (another story altogether)
when Mary, who had remained on the boat, called to say, “There is smoke in here,
and I am getting off.” I told her to
shut down electricity on the pier as I jumped into the car and sped through
this small town toward the marina. I saw
no smoke over the basin as I drove up which helped a lot with heart rate.
Mary was waiting on the floating
dock by the bow of the boat and told me she had flushed the toilet and soon
thereafter smelled a burning odor and saw white smoke when she looked aft in
the cabin from the forward sliding glass door as she exited. I jumped down the deck hatch in the aft cabin
and found LOTS of white smoke there but no raging fire. Instead, I found a charred bit of wiring on
the commode’s vacuum generator’s motor. For
anybody familiar with the way an airliner commode flushes, the Vacuflush system
will be familiar.
The motor was as hot as a firecracker
and had obviously shorted out causing the 12-Volt wires feeding it to go cherry
red burning their insulation off for about a foot until one of the wires burned
through stopping the short circuit. The
fact that this 5-Amp motor was protected by an overly large 40-Amp circuit back
in the engine room did not help matter when the short developed. I will be inserting a 5-10 Amp fuse when I
repair all this. Further testing revealed
that the electrical contacts in the pressure switch, the thing that tells the
motor to run the vacuum pump, were also burned out, probably the reason the
short circuit was broken. For the
uninitiated, that is around $450 worth in parts.
Luckily, Environmental Marine
Services in south Florida had the Vacuflush parts and said they could get them
here tomorrow afternoon at an exorbitant price.
Marine Maintenance in Panama City Beach also had the piezo-electric buzzer
I need to connect to the firefighting bottle in the engine room, and they plan
on having it here by COB tomorrow as well.
If all that happens, we should be ready by late evening to get underway
on Saturday as planned.
I had thought all this time that
the automatic gas release firefighting system would alert me at the helm with a
light which said it was the gas release indicator, but yesterday I found the pressure
switch on the bottle had its wires snipped with NO indication of where the
original wires had been. Had the gas
released in the event of a fire back there in the engine room while we were
bowling along in the waterway, the engines MIGHT have stopped when they
ingested the gas, but they might have also sucked enough gas into themselves
and out their twin exhausts reducing the concentration of the gas to the point
the fire could have continued burning the boat down. A warning of some type is needed for the
operator to know he needs to shut the engines down! The surveyor hired to check out the boat
missed this vital bit of screw-up, and the seller had nothing to tell me about
it either, when I looked at the useless warning light on the helm, damn them
both.
After I got the commode vacuum
generator parts and the firefighting system buzzer on the way, I spent the rest
of the day connecting and running forty-plus feet of wire from the helm console
to the gas bottle pressure switch and cleaning up the wiring on the vacuum
generator in readiness to receive the new parts. Ho hum, JASDIP[RG1]
- just another day in the life of a delivery crew.
