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Tech Talk with SeaBits
ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY BILGES
by Steve Mitchell Boats are a wonderful place for us to spend time on the water, but they aren’t always very friendly to the medium they float in. Most are made from substances that were never meant to be in water, and contain a wealth of pollutants that should never be in the environment. Engines contain oil and fuel, both massively poisonous to pretty much every living thing. Refrigerators and air conditioners contain freon or other similar chemicals. Cleaners for floors, counters, and other surfaces are also not great to put in our water. All of these fluids, and a lot more, could make their way into your bilges, and be unknowingly pumped overboard by your automatic bilge pump. Commercial vessels have to test their bilge water using everything from simple strips, all the way up to more complicated electronic devices—which can cost many thousands of dollars and are complicated to operate. They also have oil-water separator systems on board, some of which can be the size of an average recreational boat. These systems allow them to process polluted bilge water, removing the oil and fuel from them so they can store the bad stuff on board, and send cleaner water back into the environment. 48º NORTH
For recreational boats, many of us put absorbent cloths or socks into the bilge to prevent those substances from making it overboard, but they don’t catch everything, and won’t work for a major spill or catastrophic failure somewhere. In 2007, I had a 1970s-vintage Volvo engine in my sailboat that was rawwater-cooled. After 30 years of use, it decided to throw a cylinder through the side of the engine along with a lot of oil and fuel while I was motoring south near Vashon Island. I heard terrible noises when this happened and was able to stop the bilge pump before a major disaster occurred, but that was because of the type of failure, and the fact that I was on board when it happened. We’ve all heard horror stories about boats sinking when sticky substances in the bilge cause your float switch to stop working reliably, or even burn out a pump if left stuck on and unattended. What many may not think about is that this problem can also cause environmental damage in many cases without sinking the boat. The first step in ensuring you don’t cause an environmental disaster is to have a reliable way to monitor your bilge pump itself. This can be as simple as a panel on
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board that has a light whenever the bilge pump is running automatically. This can help if you’re on board, but does little for you if you’re away. It is also very simple, usually only indicating that it has run, but not how many times or for how long, although panels do exist for that as well. SIREN MARINE BILGE ACTIVITY SENSOR A number of companies have bilge pump run sensors that can be connected so that you are alerted whenever a bilge pump runs via text messages or app alerts. You can set complex logic to only be alerted if the pump runs more than X amount of times per hour, per day, and an overall individual runtime. Siren Marine and Nautic Alert both have full boat monitoring solutions that have this functionality and use an on-board cellular connection to ensure you always get notified. These systems are excellent to have not just in case APRIL 2020