Planned ballast system for my DD

[mhaaland]

I'm installing 3 Jabsco 1123's going to 3 separate sacs and my factory thru-hull intake is 3/4" so I'm thinking of two ideas.
1a. take out the 3/4" thru-hull and stick a 1" with some sort of manifold.
2a. keep the 3/4" thru-hull for the ski locker sac & put a 1" in for the rear tanks and side sacs.
Here is the dilemma.
1b. I can't find the material to make a 3-way manifold like the one Wake_Fun has made.
2b. i don't have a ton of room to stick another thru-hull in the engine compartment and I'm not sure where else to stick it.

Any thoughts or suggestions?
I have also included an updated ballast drawing.

[Chexi]

If I could just find a threaded PVC cross, our manifold problems would be solved. I have found a place that has 1.25" male thread to 1" hose barb. If I could find a 1.25" cross, I could go with a 1.25" thru-hull and ball valve to the 1.25" cross, then to 3x 1.24" male thread to 1" hose barb. The rest is easy. But I can't find this item threaded. It's cake to find it for pvc glued pipe, but I have had no luck for threaded. I found a bronze 1" cross, but it is very pricey and still only 1".

[mhaaland]

I'm not 100% sure what a cross is. Could you send me the link for the 1" cross so i know what it looks like and i'll do some looking also.
It was almost 50 degrees here yesterday so i was able to get out in the garage and determine what size fittings i have at the hard tanks. Lets say i think i ran into a big speed bump, the barbed fitting feeding my hard tank is only a 1/2" fitting and i can't find 1/2" to 1" anywhere. The barbed fitting for the overflow are 3/4". I had everything ready to order from WakeMakers and now i'm at a stand still. Bummer!

[rbalan]

A cross is an "X" or just picture a tee with 4 symetrical aperatures. Another option is to line 2 tees and an elbow so it looks like valve then T,T,elbow. You could also place tubing between the valve and manifold to help things fit. The advantage of these pumps is they can be mounted higher than the waterline. I'm just curious where you plan on mounting them. Another possibility is using the area under the trunk although space is probably more limited and access to shutoff would be a challenge.

[Chexi]

Matt, look here http://www.pvcfittingsdirect.com/_e/...t_Fittings.htm for your 1" to 1/2" fittings. They have almost everything.

[xrichard]

Great comments so far. I did a similar ballast install in a 95 Sport Nautique, but I didn't have much money and used aerator pumps instead of Ballast Puppies. I'd have much preferred Ballast Puppies.

I have just a few thoughts to add:

- I don't see the need for a scooped intake if using Ballast Puppies. I used a scooped one with aerator pumps, but that was simply to get them primed easily.

-Install three pumps if you can afford it...especially if you're sometimes short on time to ride. It's sooo nice to be able to quickly fill ballast at the flip of a switch.

-I'd definitely vent the side sacks. There is now doubt that, some day, you'll forget the pumps are running.

-Vent the side sacks farther forward...or run an anti-siphon loop toward the bow. I had 550lb sacks placed in a similar location and ran into an issue where the water would siphon out of the bags via the vent hose. Once the water starts siphoning out, it would continue until the bags drained quite a bit. Starting the siphon was surprisingly (disappointingly) easy. If we filled the bags to 100%, the internal pressure would force some water out the vent that that could start it....also, just the height of the top of the bag when full was close to the height of the vent, so turning or accelerating could move water around and start the siphon. I ended up installing manual valves in the vent line to address the problem...but it would have been much easier to simply drill the original vent in the bow area. I saw you had a back flow valve at that location and you might be counting on that to break a siphon--but I'm not sure how this would work for you in terms of letting air back into the system when you're dumping ballast (...not an issue for soft sacks, but hard tanks won't empty if they're not vented).

-Fly High has great service if you have questions about what fittings you need. Just call them directly. My experience is they give me Mike Seipel's cell number, I call him and he answers everything and absolutely spends all sorts of time to help figure out the best solution.

-Could be I missed it and someone already answered the battery question re: whether you need two. One will work fine...the only issue is one of potentially draining that battery while running the pumps. I doubt that will be a problem (if the battery is fully charged), but if it's a concern, just run the engine while running the pumps. I wouldn't install a second battery just because of the pumps...though I'm a big fan of second batteries to use one as a starting battery and one for everything else.

[Chexi]

Good advice Richard. I had not thought about the potential for a siphon problem. I was hoping to vent my rear sacs using the existing vent lines for the hard tanks. I will have to look closer at where they vent and consider this.

[wcherashore]

I am also looking to vent the sacks in the trunk space using the factory thru hulls. I think they won't suffer from this because they are placed pretty high and they also have check valves already installed. However, now that I think of it, my hard tanks always seem to be venting while under way. Perhaps this is because the check valves are old and not working properly or maybe the seacocks won't fully close? Not sure.... hopefully this won't be an issue when I plumb in my bagged system.

[mhaaland]

i'm thinking for my thru-hull intake manifold i might use 2 of the "T" fittings to make a 3-way manifold. I love the cross fitting idea but like you said it would be nice to find one with a threaded end. I'm also thinking of going with at least a 1-1/4" thru-hull intake with 1" hose to each pump.

I have nothing under my dash so thats the only reason i may stick my ski locker pump up there.

[Chexi]

I'll probably end up sticking a pump under the dash too. There is room, it's just getting tight in there. As for what / how to mount it... I'm still working on that one. If only my boat weren't 65 miles away, all this would be easy.

[Chexi]

Okay, so the plot thickens. I was just advised that using a manifold does have 1 major drawback. With all the lines tied together via a manifold, if you were to say want to add water to 1 bag only, it would pull water from the thru-hull, but also from the other bags tied to that manifold! This makes sense to me. As a result, it will be hard to dial in anything less than all bags full with a manifold system. So now the question is, where do we locate 3 thru-hulls??? I suppose I could keep the OEM scoop and just add 2 more 3/4" thru-hulls and ball valves, but where? I could probably fit 1 more in the engine compartment, but not 2. Is there room in the rear locker? I'm not so sure. Maybe we separate the ball valve from the thru-hull a bit and use the ball valve as in-line (actually how they were meant to be used) in order to make this work. Darn it!

[mhaaland]

I think Wake_Fun has a 3 way manifold and he says he has no problems with that set up but that's only one person. There are a few reasons i'm not going to worry about it. 1. don't have the room for 3 thru-hulls, 2. Don't have the money for 3 thru-hulls. 3. I'm not a pro or even close to it so i would have no idea if my wake is dialed in or not . I've had to deal with the factory knob gravity feed things ever since i bought the boat so what ever i do with an automatic fill/drain system will be leaps & bounds over what i had.

[mhaaland]

i don't think it would pull the water out of the others bags because the pumps should act as a non return check valve untill they are turned on.

[Chexi]

Hmm... that makes sense. I guess I'll go with the manifold, and if I run into problems, I'll worry about adding more thru-hulls later. I'll just try to place the new one in a way that leaves room... just in case.

[mhaaland]

I'm by no means a ballast guru but I've seen alot of people write about the pumps acting as a check valve and that's the only reason I'm justifying the manifold.