Ballast system on 2012 SAN210

[LindMark]

New 210 owner and trying to understand this ballast system. It has hard factory tanks and additional bags in belly, stbd, and port. Do the fill gauges on the Linc only display factory tanks and not bags? Is there anyway to display total ballast including bags? The tanks say full with nothing in bags. It seems the tanks fill and shut off and don't fill the bags until you restart. Is that how the system works? With tanks and bags full and you start to drain, are you only draining the tanks until the bags empty back into the tanks? Are the pumps on a timer or shut on and off by capacity? It is a confusing system. Thanks for your help.

[dttheel]

Pumps are on a timer. They will fill the hard tanks and stop. If you want to fill the bags, you will need to manually hit the fill buttons again after the hard tanks fill. It will just be a feel for how long or you can time how long it takes to fill to what you want and then stop them.

When you empty, the first drain will drain the hard tanks and then stop. The bags will then back fill the hard tanks. It may take a while for your float gauge to register that there is water in the hard tanks after the initial drain. But, once it does, just hit the drain buttons on the LINC again. You’ll get the feel of it pretty quickly.

The good old news is that it should create some great wakes/waves for you.

[LindMark]

Thanks you answered an additional questions. Was not sure if the capacity on the Linc gauge was computed by a float type mechanisms or computer by a pump flow rate and timer calculation. When the boat is taken out of the water, how and why does the excess water drain out? First time out of the water, I could not figure out why all this water was draining out of the boat. I did not realize there was water in the bags that were draining back into the tanks and then draining out the bottom of the boat. I would think any water in tanks would stay in tanks.

[ScooterMcgavin]

When you say you pulled boat out of water and all this water kept coming out of boat... Did you have your ballast pumps on draining when you were seeing all this water ?
or were the pumps off when you pulled it out of lake? The water should stay in tanks if the pumps aren't running and the impeller isn't worn.

[LindMark]

The way I understand it. I had all ballast filled (hard and soft). Drained to empty but that was only hard tanks. Bags still had water in them. I didn't visually check as I thought they were empty also. I pulled the boat out and then the bags emptied into the hard tanks. When I got ready to put it to bed, a steady stream of water was flowing out three areas on the bottom of the boat. Everything was turned off. I had to turn on pumps to completely drain the rest of the water. Is this normal? The tanks were gravity draining out the bottom.

[ScooterMcgavin]

That does sound like the ballast impellers may be worn and letting water past them while pumps are off, sounds like ballast system is working properly though, you just need to hit the drain/fill on the system more than once because as stated they are on timers. If the impellers are worn the new ones will drain/fill more quickly too