Fresh Water Pump constant running

D

dwarren

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exMember
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Jul 8, 2004
RO Number
14233
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I've been tracking down a fresh water leak for a while now. Every so often, I'd hear the pump kick in to re pressurize (every couple of minutes). Yesterday, I noticed that it was running constantly (although very quiet). When I run water, you hear it full volume then it kicks down but then I hear it still humming.

The pump is only a year old.

Any ideas?
 
Disconnect pipe at outlet of pump and cap it.
Now if pump runs on it's own, it's the pump.
If it doesn't you have a leak!
Had something similiar and bought the funny pipe cap and pump stopped running, so I knew I had a leak.
Then came the hard job, finding the leak, but I found my water heater had a lose overflow valve and was dripping.
Was hard to see. Easy fix.
 
If you do what CurrentSea says and have a leak it can be difficult to find. My pump was cycling so much that I couldn't sleep. I could not find a leak on anything that I could touch. My mechanic has a little hand held video deal with a camera the will detach from the small screen viewer. He holds one in one hand and pushes the camera back into places that are impossible to see. After about 30 minutes of hunting he noticed a small stream of water riding along a stringer headed toward the engine room. He traced it forward and found that one of the head faucets was dripping behind the cabinet under the sink. He had to pull the cabinet out to get to it.

I have one of these smart pumps that don't need an accumulator tank. He decided to look for one anyway and lo and behold it was under the master berth. When he poked the schrader valve water came out. Bad tank. I said let's just take it out because of my smart pump. He won and replaced it too. Now the pump will hold pressure for weeks on end and when it is used will not run every time you run water.
 
If testing shows that you have a plumbing leak, I suggest using a food color dye to trace the source of the leak.
 
One more issue that is possible - low power, not enough voltage to the pump to prime properly.

Last year my batteries were always low due to old bad fridge and I think my charger wasn't working right either.
Often times at anchor that same thing happened, the pump would be humming and not prime.
Start the generator and turn on the charger, the pump would then work fine.
 
A simple first step is to make sure the filter screen coming into the pump is not clogged...on a previous boat the mfg did a poor job of cleaning the plastic bits out of the tank and they continually clogged that filter and the pump would not prime or hold a prime and acted like yours...Also, just had a dock mate with the same issue, told him to check the filter, he had algae growth clogging it and once cleaned solved the problem.
 
So I removed the output side and blocked pump off....still ran....whacked it a few times and it stopped. Seems like whatever the mechanism is that tells it that pressure is good is "stuck". Is this something repairable or do I just trash it.....it seems to be better now......takes a little longer than normal to shut down though.
 
Doug, who is a the pumps manufacture and what is the model number?
 
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