.jpg "Tod Inlet, British Columbia")
These
are my least favourite days of the cruising season. The ones where an endless parade of fronts, troughs and low
pressure systems move through the area giving us no option but to hunker down
and wait . . . and then wait some more.
The ones where everything on Cambria seems to break down, ourselves included, and the balance
of cruising is tipped from being ‘rewarding’ to ‘difficult’. These are the ‘dog
days of summer autumn’ and they seem to drag on forever.
It doesn’t’ help
that David’s killing me with indecision and the promise of being tied up for
the year. I’m ready. I’ve been ready. It’s getting colder and our heater isn’t
working, which makes for some long and uncomfortable days. But he’s keen to pick up the parts he needs to
fix it while we’re still in Canada US
But I digress.
.TIF "The weather forecast has been 'active' lately.")
A major storm
system is headed our way, so we moved down to Tod Inlet James Bay on Sunday. The anchorage is a veritable hurricane hole located
on the backside of the world-famous The Butchart Gardens just off Saanich Inlet. It’s also a convenient place to meet Lance,
our heater guy, to get the parts we ordered while also picking his brain about
what’s been happening. But, like most
cruisers, we live on a budget and would prefer to avoid putting our hard-earned
cash into someone else’s pocket, so David tore apart the aft cabin and got to
work on the heater himself to see if he could diagnose the issue once and for
all.
We’ve been getting
flame-outs intermittently for about a year now, which coincided perfectly with
a dying house battery bank. Ever the
optimist in search of the easiest solution, I thought the problem resulted from
low voltage and would resolve itself once we replaced the batteries. David (the mechanical engineer and practical
one) wasn’t as convinced, so he changed out the fuel pump along with the
filters earlier in the year and we were back in business . . . for a
while. But here we are again, months
later, plagued with flame outs, and now everything seems points to the fact
that we picked up some bad fuel along the way.
.JPG "David's performing a diagnostic test on our Hurricane II heating system.")
To check, David
disconnected the fuel lines (supply and return) to the boiler and installed
temporary lines that he ran from a jerry can with fresh diesel. The system tested well: The hydronic loop heated up quickly and the
cabin fans went online in less than 10 minutes (a big improvement over recent
start-up times). Similarly, the domestic
water Aquastat was
quickly satisfied – all with no flame-outs.
Clearly the issue lives on the fuel side. But in the process, David discovered
that the connectors for the fuel lines were mislabeled: The supply line has been acting as the return
and the return line has been acting as the supply – the diesel going to the
heater wasn’t being filtered at all. Unfortunately,
this means we still needed Lance to come aboard despite David’s efforts: He’s the one who installed the heater, after
all.
Long story
short, it was bad fuel but David and Lance were able to isolate it in our port
diesel tank and set the system up so the heater was drawing fuel from the
starboard tank, which has been run through the engine’s filtering system and
was clean. To make sure, they adjusted
the height of the fuel supply line so it drew diesel from the top and away from
any settled gunk (belts and braces). The
heater’s fuel filter was changed out and a new fuel pump was installed. But, as far as the fuel lines were concerned,
they weren’t mislabeled after all.
Because the previous pump was either clogged or not working properly,
the diesel travelled the path of least resistance (i.e. the return side) – it
was a simple case of too many things happening at the same time and confusing
the diagnosis. Here’s what David had to
say in Cambria ’s maintenance log:
In summary, this flame-out issue was the result of two
virtually concurrent issues which, in short time span, combined to create the
problem: the progressive weakening and subsequent failure of the original fuel
pump; and, despite the installation of a fresh primary canister filter, the new
higher flow capacity and more powerful replacement pump seemingly caused the
accelerated introduction of foreign matter from the tanks into the filtration
system, thereby creating flow restriction at the filter and increased negative
pressure within the fuel feed to the heater unit, consequently creating fuel
starvation to the point of burn instability and flame-out. In a nutshell,
contaminated fuel. It took a while working through all the other possibilities
for this to become apparent. Damn it – if I haven’t been chasing ghosts and
overlooking the most simple possibilities. Yet I’ve learned even more about
this system than I previously knew – gained knowledge, worth its weight!
With the heater
up and running, we’d hoped to cross the border back into the US over the weekend
but the forecast wouldn’t cooperate so we made the decision to stay in Tod
Inlet and wait for the next weather window to take us home and officially end
our cruising season which gives us (and by us I mean David) plenty of time to
fix the heater.
Yep. You read that
right.
Once the heater
was back online, it took a whopping 24 hours for it to break down again. This time a coil in the salon fan unit burst
a weld and antifreeze leaked out of the system into the bilge. It’s not the first time this has happened. In fact, it’s the fourth. But the only way to fix it at anchor is to
bypass the unit and take it out the system which means, after one measly day,
we no longer have heat in the salon.
And I'm still waiting for that shower.
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