Shower pump - to change or not?

[nicknorman]

12 hours ago, Hudds Lad said:

Not sure why you think it’s a bodge-up, it’s an off-the-shelf product, not something cobbled together in an ice cream tub?

 

Anywho, i’ll give it a clean at the weekend, and then take measurements etc. to look toward upgrading it to a gulper and manual switch affair.

On one hand it’s worked fine for 16yrs with no leaks, on the other the likelihood of failure increases by the day.  

We had that kind of thing on our new build boat. It lasted about 4 years of leisure use, then the pump failed to kick in for whatever reason (clogged with gunge, float switch failure or whatever) and stinky shower water polluted the bilge. So it is a bad concept because the various failure modes are unnoticeable until after the bilge is full of dirty soapy water. I removed and binned it and replaced with whale gulper which has been flawless since.

Being a smartarse I did install flow switches into the hot and cold shower pipes which turn the pump on (via the Empirbus system) and it runs on for about 15 seconds after shower turned off. So you just turn the shower on, do the showering thing and the pump looks after the rest automatically. But you can hear it running, which is good!