Cooling Water - cautionary tale

boatone

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29 Jul 2001
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Just a few cables from Boulters Lock
www.tmba.org.uk
You may remember a previous thread of mine re lack of cooling water telltales on my P32 and overheating problems..
Having had a few instances of overheating on port engine recently decided to thoroughly check raw water intake side for any blockages.
On AQD32A raw water is sucked up from the outdrive leg and then through the oil cooler before moving on to the raw water pump and thence the heat exchanger.
There is no seacock and there is also no weed filter of any kind. Slotted intakes on the leg are supposed to hold back any major rubbish but the first real obstructions for minor rubbish are the stack tubes in the oil cooler.
Sure enough, I found the inlet end of the oil cooler full of weed and many of the tubes clogged. At a rough guess more than 50% of the passageways were blocked so water flow would have been severely reduced. Being based on the non-tidal Thames I am now looking to see how I can fit a more efficient weed filter in circuit before the oil cooler!




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Boat 1 suggest you do a replumbing job, buy a vetus type inlet strainer and put it before the cooler, use flexi rubber tubing mount it say in the bulkhead above the waterline, makes sense to eliminate the trapping problem, see it a lot on the rivers as well, a new cooler is about 1100 plus the vat, so look after it.
paul js
 
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