Ballast pumps fill - no drain

[jkallen21]

I haÂ’ve seen several posts about this but no solutions. IÂ’ have an 06 SANTE that the ballast pumps fill, but will noÂ’t drain. Testing with a meter, they actually have no power during drain. The dash lights flash like they should and no breakers are tripped in the back or at the driver kickplate.

Edit: I changed the impeller before I obtained a meter so that wasn’t part of the problem. I also should note that This is happening on all 3 pumps. Also, all 3 gauges no longer function. I have read some posts that say the pumps will not run if the gauges read empty and that I can bypass with a jumper wire. I found the connector going to the sender in the port tank and disconnected it. I then stuck a loopback jumper wire on the connector’s boat side and it made no difference. I assume that’s what was meant about a jumper wire but I am definitely grasping.


Any ideas?

Thanks!

[Shawn Henderson]

Your problem is most likely the sending unit or gauge. If the gauge is showing empty the pump won’t come on to empty the tanks. In my case all 3 of my sending units were bad some how the floats lost their magnetism (spelling?). So when I ran a magnet around on the sending units the gauges would react and the pumps would turn on to empty.

[jkallen21]

That’s a great tip Shawn. Did you remove the sender from the tank to test this? How big of a magnet was needed?

[Shawn Henderson]

I removed one then plugged it in to the other pigtails to test before removing all the sending units. I used a magnet that was on the bottom of my flash light it wasn’t to big. You can also test the sending units with you ohm meter.

[jkallen21]

I looked at this today so I have some updates:

A simple jumper wire did in-fact move the gauge to full instantly. But the pumps still wouldn’t run in reverse. So I unplugged each pump and used some small alligator clips and extra wire to reverse the polarity manually. Then I just pushed the dash button to “fill” the tanks but since the polarity was reversed, they actually drained. Doing this, All pumps ran in reverse/drain without issue.
So since I have zero Volts of power to the pumps when running in reverse (drain) in normal operation, and forcing the gauge to read FULL doesn’t change the power situation, I can only assume that the relays are bad. I will look at that Monday I hope. Weird that all 3 relays would go out in the same winter though.

[jkallen21]

I now know that the problem is...the boat was reupholstered as well as a ton of other work done this winter. If you've seen my post about the disconnected radio cable, that is actually related to this problem. While I was busy looking for where the radio cable was supposed to go, I kept seeing what looked like the backside of a gauge that was white and circular. There was nothing plugged into it which I thought was strange, but it wasn't related to my radio cable so I just kept looking. Well, I finally found the radio cable, and then tonight I read this other post:
https://www.planetnautique.com/vb5/f...-drain-problem

That white circular thing is the dry run sensor for the pumps and it definitely needs to be plugged in! So I will have to locate the wires for it as well. I assume the shop disconnected these and failed to get them back as they were.