Dry bilge diy system

[Woodsea]

I just finished a dyi dry bilge system. I used a $30 diaphragm pump about $30 and a digital timer about $15 on Amazon. My primary purpose is to keep the area under my PSS “dripless” shaft seals dry. I will probably run a few other lines to areas that sometimes get a little wet. The pump has 3/8” attachments. I stepped it down by inserting the next size smaller vinyl tubing eventually getting to 3/16 lines which run to bilge areas.

[Pcpete]

If your pss seals are leaking, you should readjust the preload on the graphite ring.

[Woodsea]

Pete,
I had new PSS seals installed in 2014. I have become an expert at adjusting them with new set screws every time. It works for a while. They are close to being fully compressed at this point. They have not worked well for me and I will be changing them out this winter. They work fine for some but a lot of folks are frustrated with theirs as well. There is another thread here on BOC addressing this. I’ve been told by NHD that they are hesitant to use them any longer. I’ve heard this from other mechanics as well.

[Woodsea]

https://lifeempirically.com/2018/03/...-bilge-system/

Above is the design idea I used. The dry bilge idea is to get rid of the water that is left by traditional bilge pumps. My intention is to run a pickup to bilge areas that accumulate a bit of water and pump that water over board.

[Renilyab]

Nice job. Thanks for sharing. Please let us know how it works for you after a few months.

[higgins_jr]

Creative Steve! I’ve just installed a Whale gulper pump head in the bilge (on the manual switch) next to the regular Johnson automatic pump. I be positioned the actual pump next to the wash down pump near the gennie! That takes most of the water out when needed.

Cheers

[Woodsea]

John,
I’ve done the plastic bottle “fix” similar to your design. It keeps much of the spray down but not all. Once the water in that area gets a couple of inches deep, it just gets splashed around. I do sponge it out whenever I check it which is before every longish run. I’m just tired of it. The dry bilge will get that water out of there with the flip of a switch or I can just program it to come on for a minute or two a few times a day. Maybe the heavier PSS seals would fix it but if so, PSS should have issued a recall. None of my seal compression adjustments have lasted more than 20-30 hours. Mine have been pretty disappointing since new. They were installed by one of the better yards in the SF area. As you know, I’ve done all the stuff they told me to do, cleaning, alignment, balance, etc. At any rate, I am ranting but they have just not worked for me. One of the other reasons is the ability of draining any remaining bilge water in the boat. Win, win!

[ksanders]

I REALLY like your idea!

As you must know once you get enough water that the prop shafts are wet you get spray/splash when under way.

[[email protected]]

Woodsea….is everything still working a year later?
- are you using sponges as pick ups?

[smitty477]

On the 4788...
We added a 'divider' between the shaft gland area and the bottom of the engines so that the water could not reach back under the engines and/or get whipped up by the shafts - this is really just a copying what was in place on our past 4588 Bayliners.
note - once we switched to the gortex 'no drip' packing we never got any amount of water in this area anyway, just not enough to drain.

We then added a new weir hole at the bottom of the new segregated shaft area to drain any water to the lower 'proper' bilge area where it is easily stripped out by the lower pump.
Here are some pictures of that new divider and weir hole before we cleaned up the shaft areas and added the 'plastic bottle' spray deflectors.

[Woodsea]

Nofacey,
The sponge idea works kind of… when all the sponges are wet. I ended up going with 1/8” tubing. As long as there is a little water in each pick up it pulls water. I have it set on a timer to come on for 5 minutes everyday at noon. I ended up changing out the PSS drip less seal so Tides last fall. So far not a drop. So I pulled the pick ups out of the shaft seal areas and routed them to another couple of areas that get a little moisture. They stay pretty dry now. Yay!
I like Ron’s fix on the above post. That’s what Bayliner should have done.