Toilet Woes and General Maintenance

Waste Pump Maintenance

As is bound to happen eventually, our manual toilet pump started leaking.  Our Lavac toilet came with a Whale Mark V.  That original pump stopped creating suction a few years ago, so we replaced it with a new Whale Mark V and bought a rebuild kit for the old one to keep as a spare.  No pump is foolproof, and this one has been in service for several years with literally zero maintenance.  We like the Whale Mark V because it’s a simple and straightforward pump.  Spare parts are available on Amazon and nearly all marine supply websites.  We installed the same pump as a backup, manual bilge pump in the cockpit.

So when the pump started leaking, we realized, though we had bought a rebuild kit for the old pump, we hadn’t actually rebuilt it.  No time like the present I guess.  The rebuild would have taken just a half hour or so, but we also hadn’t cleaned the old pump either.  So we let it soak in some dilute acid for a bit, gave it a scrub, then put it back together with new o-rings, gaskets and joker-valve.  It looked  like that’s where the problem was.  The joker-valve wasn’t closing completely, so water was leaking by causing the suction to fail.

Bi-Monthly Salt Bucket Maintenance

Hypochlorous acid (HClO) is what treats the waste so it’s safe to discharge overboard.  It’s a weak acid that forms when chlorine dissolves in water, and itself partially dissociates, forming hypochlorite (ClO⁻). Hypochlorous acid and hypochlorite are oxidizers, and the primary disinfection agents of chlorine solutions.  For the Electroscan, the chlorine comes from salt water (NaCl + H2O).

We’re currently in fresh water so we have to supply the salt water via a salt bucket.  The bucket is plumbed in-line with the treatment system, so when we use the pump it pulls fresh water via a thru-hull and saltwater from the bucket.  We buy bags of salt usually used for water softeners from the hardware store for about $5.  This typically lasts us about a month.  We add salt to the bucket about twice a month.  It’s certainly cheaper than getting a pump-out every week for $15.  And over time, the entire installation has been cheaper than getting routine pump-outs too.

Bi-Annual Acid Treatment

The Electroscan requires an acid treatment every six months.  Here’s how the unit functions:

When the system is activated the electrical charge applied to the patented plates generates the disinfectant to kill viruses and bacteria. As that disinfectant is generated the high speed macerator breaks apart the waste allowing greater contact between waste and disinfectant.  –Raritaneng.com

Overtime the plate becomes coated with scale.  The acid treatment removes the scale so the unit will continue to create an adequate charge to generate hypochlorous acid.  If we start to get a lot of low-amp failures we know we either need to add salt or do an acid treatment.

We’re really glad we have the Electroscan and it’s been really reliable.  Until it wasn’t recently.  We’re pretty good about doing routine maintenance on the Electroscan.  But after the last time we did the acid treatment, we still had trouble getting the amps to be consistently above 14-15 and we were adding salt to the bucket more frequently.  After using it for 4-5 years I guess it was time to open it up.

Overall it didn’t look too bad inside.  The metal plates had a little calcification on them and the bottom of the unit was caked with calcification.  After scraping and chipping everything clean, the amp level was consistently 15ish or or so.  We didn’t change the gaskets this time since they appeared to be just fine, but we did order a spare gasket kit just in case.