Took the boat to Smith Mountain Lake this weekend, and while sitting in a restaurant; a pretty quick and heavy rain shower moved in. It came in so fast putting the cockpit cover on was useless. I did eventually make it down and cover up the dash and guages, and went back inside and kept an eye on the bilge pump outlets to wonder when the Auto Bilge was going to kick on. Some time went by, and no fountains coming out of the boat. I headed down and openned the engine hatch, and water was up to the bottom of my oil pans. I reached down and could manually twist the 'axle' of the Attwood Float Switches to make them kick on the auto bilge pumps; however, they would not float up on their own. I removed the float switches from the bottom of the boat, by removing the three screws holding each down, and figured they were gummed up and sticking to the bottom of the boat. When I layed the float switch down into the 4 inches of water in the bilge, the whole thing would float around a bit, but would NOT kick on. WTF??

This is the float switch I have; two of them:


Turns out, as water entered the bottom of the housings, air was being trapped in the upper portion of the float switch housing cover, and the float switch itself did not have enough floatation to overcome this pressure; and hence, float up to kick on. I would call this a factory defect/bad/terrible design. As soon as I bored a little hole in the top of each float switch housing cover, the air escaped, water entered and filled the housing, and hence, the float floated.

I had tested my auto bilge pumps float switches by just manually picking twisting the 'axles' of the float switch, but this is NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

FILL YOUR BILGE WITH WATER, and make sure they come on as they are supposed to. I did not have a close call, but I do not want anyone else to have one either.

thanks sydwayz i'll have to check mine.i think mine kicked on the first weekend i picked up the boat.

Brian,

Very interesting. Can you tell me if the hinging point is inboard or out?

Thanks, Pat.

Pat, the hinging point is forward; float to the back.

Great advise Brian, I 4200 my pump in a few weeks ago because I could not get under
the engine. I notice that the pump was not comming on automaticaly, aparently a small amt of 4200 glued the float down, it works fine now once it was freed.

Eddie