No one likes to think about it, but the waste system on a boat is one of the most important. Without it working perfectly, life on the water becomes miserable.

One of the little things that is always a problem is monitoring the macerator pump. Designed to pump out the black water tank when you are in approved waters, the pump is vital to managing the waste system. Usually they come wired such that you switch on a breaker to turn the pump on and then turn it off with the same switch when the tank is empty. The hassle is that you are always underway when you pump out, and your attention is correctly focused on driving the boat and not on monitoring the time the macerator pump is on.

Even when we set a timer to remind us to turn off the pump, it always seems that something comes up that needs our attention and the pump gets neglected. Your concern is that running the pump for an extended time, instead of the few minutes it actually needs to empty the tanks, will shorten the life of the pump.

To address this problem, many mariners have installed a mechanical timer switch that you set for a specific time, and it will automatically turn off the pump when it gets to the end of the cycle. You may have seen these mechanical timers. They have a large black rotary dial and the switch requires a full-sized household outlet box.

My boat does not have the room for two of theses switches and the old style rotary timers are not to my aesthetic liking.

So I tasked my electrician Shawn Clark with coming up with an electronic solution so that we could push a button once, and the pump would run for a predetermined time and then shut off. Further, we needed it all to fit in a small space. Shawn came though with a couple of small electronic switches to engage the system. Click here for a link to the switches.

Next he found remote electronic timers that we can set from from one to ten minutes. Click here for a link to the timers. Shawn designed a custom switch plate that fit perfectly into the lower helm.

Because it takes only four minutes to empty a tank and the tank is seldom full when you run the macerator pump, we set the timers to two minutes. If you need more pumping, you just push the button one more time. The system work great. Now when its time to pump, we just press the two buttons and "forget about it".

Waste Away