Need Photo of Sump Box - Mine is Jacked Up
- Thread starter FTL_Alan
- Start date
Fossil Fuel
Member
Looks like standard configuration
FTL_Alan
New member
Here's mine. Looks like on mine they changed the cabin bilge to pump into the sump box, as there is a cut hose that would appear to have originally connected to the bilge pump and to the back of the compartment where you see the connection that has no hose attached. I don't see the advantage of having the bilge go into the sump, rather than straight to the back of the boat. Maybe the drain hose that's been cut somehow got clogged behind the compartment, and they had to improvise by routing the bilge into the sump. Any other ideas?
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I have a different model but the box is pumped out by a pump located in the engine compartment then there is another pump that pumps out the bilge area if there is water outside of the box. I have had countless failures with the box not pumping out and the water is outside of the box. I'm curious if they added that pump you see next to the shower box to pump that area out. I would think the second hose that is cut has a pump on the other end in the engine compartment.
FTL_Alan
New member
To close the loop on this thread I started, my mechanic was able to confirm that the hose that's been cut (as seen in my photos) was intended (by Formula's original design) to drain the cabin bilge out of the transom under the swim platform where there are other drain holes. However, the part of this hose that can't be seen (it follows the same path as the sump drain hose) that is behind the sump compartment wall is somehow blocked and will not drain. We confirmed this by reconnecting the cabin bilge to this connection and filling the bilge and turning on the bilge pump. It would not drain through the hose, proving that there is something blocking the hose behind the sump compartment. We were able to locate both of these hoses coming down the starboard side along with the toilet hose and could see that there is a lot of foam sprayed in the area where these hoses come out of the cabin on the starboard side. So the sump hose and this cabin bilge hose are both coming out of this foam, but only the sump hose will drain. That means that the bilge hose was likely crimped during the foam installation process, and thus likely never worked when the boat was new. Realizing that the cabin bilge would not drain, someone decided to route the bilge into the sump box. Of course, the danger with this is that the sump pump is half the power of the bilge pump, so if there was ever a situation where water was flooding the bilge at a rate faster than the sump could pump it out, then the boat could sink. For example, if I left the cabin door open during a very hard rain that put enough water into the cabin that overwhelmed the capacity of the sump to pump it out. My mechanic suggested fixing this by running a hose from the cabin bilge out to the starboard side and install a thru-hull, as it would be much more difficult (if not impossible) to run a new hose along the same path as the original crimped hose, because it runs in between the cabin wall and the fuel tank, and there's no access to this space from inside the cabin on the back wall. For now I decided to keep using the jacked-up method of draining the bilge into the sump. Hope my explanation makes sense.