2003 SAN - Another Ballast Install + Underwater Lighting

[JamesBeardTX]

I thought I'd post this for anyone else that wants to tackle a ballast install on their SAN this fall/winter. I did a lot of searching on the forums, and I found some helpful stuff, but I still had a lot of questions I had to figure out when I did it myself. I'll break it down piece-by-piece to hopefully answer anyone's questions. Below is a link to a photo album of the install with some notes on it. I'll reference the pictures in the post.

We installed a separate pump and plumbing for bow and ski locker sacs. We also added 2x Seablaze X2 underwater lights. Please note I didn't have to remove my factory belly tank as the previous owner must have done it already.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/C4fExE6BRhyBjjoa7

1) Removal of the Bow Cooler: Estimated time 1-2 hours.

This may have been the most tedious portion of the ballast install. That cooler is really well fiberglassed in, and it has some hard angles to cut. I used an oscillating multitool with a general purpose cutting blade on it. Please note that this is going to kick up a crapload of fiberglass dust and shards, and you'll want a face mask, eye protections, and please for the love of god wear long sleeves and pants if you don't want to itch for the next week.

Do yourself a favor and cut out the bottom section first. I made the mistake of trying to cut around the top first, and it is a blind cut with some terrible angles. You can see in my photos that I eventually figure out you should cut along the bottom curvature (where the straight sides stop and come in). Before you finish cutting that out, you'll likely want to make some cuts across the middle so you can take it out in pieces. After the bottom is out, run your cutting tool along the top edge and take the entire rim out flush with the bottom of the seats. The side toward the middle is particularly nasty due to a fiberglassed piece of PVC pipe back there to run wires. That fiberglass it THICK and you will want a pair of grips and some gloves to pull it all apart.

Cutting around the bevel

Slicing the cooler into pieces to remove

After you've got the cooler out, use a prybar to scrape the foam insulation off the seat fiberglass, and then use a sander to clean up all of the sharp edges.

2) New 1" Thru-Hull Intakes for Pumps: Estimated time 1-2 hours (2 man job)

I looked high and low for recommended locations on the forums, and people seem to put them all over. I'm sure someone can tell me why where I put them was terrible, but in the end we decided to do it under the starboard side of the engine compartment. This had the most natural room to run the elbow and ball valve. In the 2003, I couldn't really find any place to do a vertical mount, so this seemed like our best bet. The positioning also left plenty of room to install the elbows & valves after the fact (which makes the install much easier).

Please do yourself a favor and have a partner for this, and make sure to have the right tools handy. The biggest recommendation I can give is to have a tool to hold the thru-hull mushroom in place. There are two ribs inside the mushroom that you can use to tighten it in place. You can order a thru-hull step tool from amazon, build your own with some sort of tapered piece of wood with two channels cut in it (like a stair balluster), or just jimmy rig the whole thing with a file/bolt/wrench/whatever you can find (and a whole lot of cursing). We didn't realize this until it was too late, and ended up using a box end wrench and a lot of sweat and foul language.

We also decided to offset the spacing about an inch apart. That way we'd have just a bit more room for the valves to run along side each other. You can see on my photos that we messed with quite a few placements. Overall, this one seemed to work well as it would give us enough clearance to go over the steering cable, and the cooling hose for transmission could run behind it. (If you want to test for yourself, we found a bock of 2x4 laid flat would give you a decent estimate for the height of the stem on the thru-hull.

Thru hull locations under the boat. Note we staggered them instead of putting in a straight line. Made it easier inside

Thru Hull location in the bilge - under the starboard side of the engine (over top of the steering cable) You can see the water intake hose tucked away at the top left of the picture.

For the install, we removed the water intake hose from the V-Drive and ran it backwards out of the way. That leaves a lot of room left in the bilge for you to drill your holes and install the fittings. Be sure the person inside the boat has a decent pair of channel-locks or any wrench that will fit on that nut. It takes some good tightening to get it hard against the hull. If you happen to have a deep socket large enough for it, that would be even better.

After the thru-hull and nut are on, we added some teflon tape and attached the elbows, valves, and hose barbs. Overall, not that hard once you figure out where to put the holes.

3) Running the Hoses: Estimated time 4+ hours total for Locker & Bow runs

This took a lot more time than I anticipated, mainly because we had to remove the gas tank. The 1" lines just wouldn't fit over the top of the tank and down into the channel along side the ski locker. Removing the tank is pretty easy, just make sure you've run it nearly dry, or get a pump and remove the gas while you do the install. If you look in my photos, you can see the picture of the channel along side the locker. The gas tank has about a 1" gap along the starboard side, and it also has a channel under the starboard side (for the steering cable line and some wiring that run through the PVC you see in my pictures.

View of the channel under the gas tank. This is the 1" tube running to the bow sac.

We ran the bow line through the 1" wiring gap up through the channel beside the ski-locker and out to the bow. This is a really easy run once the tank is removed, and it should only take a few minutes. We the ran the 2nd 1" line along the pvc pipe under the channel in the gas tank. I used a 1 3/8ths hole saw to punch a hole in the side of the ski locker, and brough the line in so it would be at the bottom of the locker sac. You should see this in my photos as well. Once those two lines were in place, we replaced the gas tank and were on our way to the vent lines.

Locker fill line - Drilled a small hole in the bottom right corner, and ran this along the bottom of the gas tank channel

How the lines look when the gas tank is installed. The ski locker comes out the bottom, and the bow line runs on top of the wiring.

For the vent lines, I started by figuring out where I wanted the new vent holes. My boat only had the rear vents, and a single vent for the belly bilge on the starboard side. There was also a vent for the glove box drain on the port side, but I thought it would look funny to have a high vent, and a low vent on the port side. So I opted to add two new vent holes on the starboard. This uses the same size hole saw as your 1" thru-hull. Just be sure to have someone in the boat doing the magnet to make sure you aren't going to hit anything. Once these are in, it's a quick thing to figure out how much hose you'll need. I did about a 12" section off the vent holes down to a check valve, and then I worked backwards from there to run the vent hoses. You probably only need about 15' total of 3/4" hose to do this.

New vents from the outside

Vent lines from the inside. Both of these are really easy to run. Note I ran one on either side of the existing bilge vent to avoid the steering cable. If you look, you can see both check valves in place.

I didn't install the lines to the pumps yet, as I didn't have their exact length ready.

4) Build a Pump Mount: Estimated Time - 30m to 1 hour

I used a 24"x48" piece of 1/2" HDPE, and cut it down to 24"x18" for a mounting plate. From there, I offset the pumps high/low to make running hoses easier. For now, we decided to just wedge them in place under the starboard ski-locker vent. There's a nice 1/2" channel behind that vent that makes it pretty easy to wedge into place. I thought about mounting behind the seats, and I still may in the future, but mounting to the backside of the seat fiberglass felt pretty flimsy on inspection. I'll let you know how this placement works out over time. I only run 550's in the rear lockers right now, so I shouldn't have too much issue with clearance.

Pump board with pumps mounted

Pump board location

4) Install Seablaze X2 Lights: Estimated time 30m to 1 hour

You can go crazy trying to find the exact spot to mount these things to make them perfectly square on both sides, but it will take you forever. I used the eyelets as guides and measure down to where they were equidistant down, and I eyeballed them being dead center down from the eye. Not perfect, but close enough. Just make sure you have a decent set of drill bits, and be careful when using the template. It's pretty easy to get off on the bottom screw. If I were doing it again, I would likely just make the center hole, and hold the light itself up to make the template. This will save you some broken screw heads. Also, this guy does a great writeup of this install: https://www.caraudionow.com/lumitec-...-installation/

Seablaze X2 from the rear.

Seablaze X2 - Testing Wiring

5) Run the Wires & Install Switches: Estimated time 2 hours

I used the wakemakers plug & play wiring here, and it made the wiring very easy. Most of the time in here came from wiring the underwater lights. I'll skip how to run the wakemakers wiring, because that is literally just zip tying things off. Though, if I did it again, I would definitely not get the 20ft kits. That was WAYYYY too much wire for where I installed, but it's better safe than sorry.

For the seablaze, you'll have to make a wiring harness to reach the battery. Use marine grade 3 wire 14/3 if you want to tie into a factory switch for the on off. I ended up using the shower wire on my 40 pin (check the wiring diagram, should be hole 11 orange/black wire). My boat never had a shower, so this was a very easy one to use. It's as simple as pulling the panel off, finding the correct wire in the loom, and cutting/splicing in. The hardest part was running a long wire from the dash, round the bow, and back to the wiring loom.

For the loom, I just used heat shrink crimp connectors. I tried some low-temp solder ones, and they were more hassle than it was worth. Use a decent crimp tool, and you'll end up with some fantastic results.

The only other recommendation I have is to get a busbar or something for all the new connections you're adding to your battery. I have a single battery still (another project for the winter), and between the stereo, lights, and ballast pumps, my battery terminal looked like a christmas tree. I plan to fix it this weekend, but it's what I had at the moment.

For the switches, I just removed the factory gauges for the ballast tanks. Since they don't work now (hard tanks replaced with sacs a long time ago), I figured there was no point in keeping them. At some point I'm going to replace the factory aerator pumps in the back as well so I'll have 2 sets of two switches. But for now, this is what I've come up with. I used a dremmel and cutting wheel to cut out for the switches. This took all of 2 minutes.

New switch location

6) Install the Intake Tubes: Estimated Time 15m-30m

Now that everything else was done, all I needed to do was cut my runs to the right length, and hook up the intakes to the pumps. A few minutes with a heat gun, hose clamps, and a pvc cutter and it was all done.

Attached intake hoses (we had to get sprinkler connectors from Home Depot - be sure to check your thread size when you order the hose barbs from WM)

Hoses attached to pumps

All in, I spent 2 days on the project that I probably could have done in one with better planning. Having two sets of hands is unbelievably helpful, and be prepared for plenty of aggravation. It was a fun project, but I'm glad that it's finally done. I'll post picture of the wake once my front sac finally gets here. Dang that COVID backorder!

If you have any questions that I didn't answer, please let me know. I know I had a ton when I read other posts, so hopefully this helps someone. At some point, I'll probably come back and add the photos directly to the post, but for now I'm tired out from writing this wall of text.

[HALLEBETT]

Nice write up! thanks for taking the time to show your setup!