Hello! New member here and the new owner of a 1987 Mull F30. Apologies in advance for the amount of questions I am likely to be posting as I get to to know the boat.
First up: I seem to have a relatively complex waste management system and I’m trying to sort it out and see if these were stock or if someone got creative.
What makes it complex is that it seems to have a manual pump for dumping the holding tank overboard. I believe the surveyor improperly identified it as a manual bilge pump, but the hoses only run between the holding tank and the overboard seacock. It’s located under the v-berth along with the rest of the connections from the toilet. The system seems designed to find as many ways to get effluent overboard as possible, which is not my need given that my primary cruising area is the Chesapeake Bay.
One of the reason I ask is that the pump has come come unattached from the hull (it seems it was glued in place) and I’m trying to figure out if I even want it still.
If you don’t want to empty your holding tank manually overboard, then you don’t need the pump. If you can make your boat simpler, that’s always a plus.
You may want to look at the page below for various layouts of heads tank, through hull and deck pump emptying. I had to do some pipe tracing to understand the setup I had on an earlier boat and found this quite useful. As you can see most setups have a valve that diverts waste either into the holding tank or directly to the through hull. Most then have a Y connector taking both the heads output and pumped output from the tank to the through hull. The writing on the Hull seems to say you have a valve (not shown) that selects either from the holding tank or from the heads to your through hull. However I think the label may be misleading and probably selects heads to tank or heads to through hull. Anyway here is the link:
Thank you. I’ve attached some pics wit the rest of the story, though they are hard to assemble into the complete picture. I’ll be going down to the boat on Saturday and hope to sort it out better. Meanwhile, I’ll check out that reference.
Yes difficult without seeing more. The second pic seems to be the trough hull for the heads. If that is so the writing next to it does not make much sense. Presumably head OB means the heads goes out directly to this through hull so it should be open. Not sure why you need to close it for tank OB. Unless the holding tank is only emptied through a deck fitting. My best guess is that the Y valve takes the heads and diverts to either tank or through hull and the tank is emptied through a deck fitting. But then you would not need the manual pump, so there is probably more to the picture.
In case anyone is curious, this is my first best guess at tracing the general flow of the system. Essentially it has the standard head to overboard or tank, but is also set up to send the tank overboard via the manual pump in addition to the tank to pump out.
Yes that would work but you have at least one thing missing. The valve on the through hull, without closing that you would get flow to both OB and tank. Also you had another two way valve in one of your pictures (PXL_20220429_194015513.jpg), perhaps that was to stop the pump backfilling the heads, which you would not want!!
This isn’t exactly on topic, but I figured it might be of interest. My boat had an upgraded holding tank setup that added a new 30 gallon tank under the v-berth and reused the original 12 gallon tank to hold “fresh” water to flush the toilet. The problem was, I wanted a way to discharge directly overboard from the head for when I go offshore, instead of relying on the macerator pump to discharge the tank. It took a bit of engineering, but we were able to do it with a minimum of Y valves.
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Yes that would work but you have at least one thing missing. The valve on the through hull, without closing that you would get flow to both OB and tank. Also you had another two way valve in one of your pictures (PXL_20220429_194015513.jpg), perhaps that was to stop the pump backfilling the heads, which you would not want!!
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Yes, my diagram skipped the seacock at the OB thu-hull -my bad! That two-way in the picture you reference is what I have labeled as Y coming off the tank and divides the flow either to the pump out or the manual pump. I’m still not entirely confident in the diagram and will need to get back on board (tomorrow) to check against reality.
Current European regulations for new boats require all output from the heads to go directly into a holding tank, and there’s now precious few places in Scandinavia where it can legally be emptied overboard, no matter the age of the boat. When I installed one ten years ago, I put it above the waterline, with a pump-out fitting on deck and a seacock below the waterline. This means the only pump is the one attached to the toilet bowl, with no “Y” valves needed. Sometimes you just have to head quietly out to sea, or lose the expensive carbon filter on the vent line! We’ve never quite got used to the Swedish system of taking your toilet paper to the little hut in the woods when you’re tied to the rocks.
MarcHudgins, I have currently pulling all of my lines in my Freedom 30 and am working on replacing them once the temperature gets above freezing again.
I had a slightly different issue in that my F30 didn’t even have the deck pumpout connected, every line was routed to go directly out the bottom of the boat so I had to lock my Head up so that if the coast guard in Cleveland boarded me they couldn’t say I was using it and thus in violation.
Do you happen to have your final diagram of what you did?I have some thoughts and may start my own head progress, but my biggest concern was not leaving an opening on the thru-hull which currently has the both the toilet and HT lines going to it via Y-valves.
I didn’t want to replace the thru-hull but if the plastic on it cracks like the y-valves did then I may have to.
