Surprise! The Toilet died

 

An essential and valuable piece of equipment decided to take a holiday.  This occured immediately after my morning coffee if you know what I mean.  Yep, the head died just after a very moving experience.  Too graphic, well sorry, it was very distressing.  Suddenly your plan for the day gets reorganized.  First priority is to decide if an 8-year-old marine head is worth repairing or should it be replaced with a new unit.  I decided to defer that decision until I dis-assembled sufficiently to identify the source of failure.  The next step was to begin disassembly

Disassembly began with trying to figure out how to empty the bowl.  Beth came up with the best solution.  Little wonder she is such a valuable member of Amy Marie’s crew.  Her suggestion was to motor to the pump out dock and use the pump out hose to suck the bowl dry. 

 

Once the toilet was clean as a whistle, disassembly began.  First all hoses were disconnected, then the bowl was removed.  This exposed the motors, pumps, gear assembly and controller that perform their behind the scene magic.  The very last item removed turned out to be the culprit.  When I turned it over and removed a cogged rubber belt, which was driven by a motor, it revealed that the drive cog on the macerator/pump motor was broken.  The cog was plastic and spit due to repeated loading over its eight-year life. 

The replacement cog/gear is metal.  Now that the cause of failure was revealed, I made the decision to replace the broken part rather than replacing the entire toilet.  Time will tell if this was a wise decision.   The repair kit contained a new belt and a metal cog/gear for the pump and the drive motor.  Both plastic gears were removed and replaced with the metal replacements.  The new belt was installed, and all components were returned to their designed location. 

The moment of truth had arrived.  Rather than use the onshore marina facilities, which were nice, but inconvenient for middle of the night potty call, could we now revert to the convenience of our on-board toilet.  Yes!  It worked.  Total time for the repair was two days.  One day for disassembly and one day for replacing parts and re-assembling.  With this unexpected task complete, we were able to return to our list of projects for preparing Amy Marie for the Great Loop.  We tried to look at the positive side of this unexpected repair.  It happened while at our home marina with excellent marine supply stores close by.  It didn’t happen when we were in some remote location where it would be difficult to get needed replacement parts.