It has been a long time since we posted anything on this blog, so you may have thought that we have disappeared! Well, we are not living on board any more, but we do get out on Zindagi for short trips from time to time.
Our most recent trip – just a few days in mid-July – was a most enjoyable time with Adam and Oli, with Dylan (3) and Erin (9 months), the youngest of our 4 grandchildren. Showery Staffordshire was quite a relief for them from the relentless heat of Madrid!
But the recurring problem was that the engine kept losing power and cutting out, and then taking ages to re-start. We managed our planned itinerary from Hatherton Marina to Tixall Wide and back, but it would have been even more enjoyable without the engine problems.
Back in April 2022, when Jeremy, Laura and Nathan had used the boat, they had experienced the same problem. Jeremy changed the fuel filter and all had been OK for the rest of their trip. Since then, in July last year, we had done the 'Staffordshire / Black Country Ring' with our friends David and Mary with no fuel problems at all.
Diesel bug? Shouldn't have been, as we have always added the recommended dose of Marine 16's Diesel Bug Treatment whenever we have filled up with diesel.
But it seemed to be the likely problem, so I started looking online for remedies for 'water in the diesel' and 'diesel bug infection'. Lots of very helpful information on Canal World and quite a few ideas on YouTube. The best of these that I found was at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViJBAbDhhkI&t=128s , so I set out to copy Graham Keating's guidelines and build myself a simple DIY Diesel 'Polishing' system. Thank you, Graham!!
Instead of spending £260 - odd on a genuine Racor filter, I found a cheap Chinese copy on eBay, together with a 12 volt 'Facet' style pump. Then some flexible fuel line and various fittings to enable me to first draw off whatever watery sludge there might be lurking at the bottom of our fuel tank and then to connect to the Racor-style filter and pump.
Surprisingly little water came out. I had feared perhaps 10 litres or even more, but about 2½ litres emerged from about 130 litres of fuel in the tank. Time to connect the fuel polisher! You can see the Filter, with the clear polycarbonate bowl below and the metal filter housing above. The small black object is the Facet pump. I just connected the inlet to the bottom of the diesel tank, ran the outlet into a plastic jerrycan and hooked the pump up to the battery. The cut-off milk bottle underneath is to run off the collected water and sediment.
The pump started chugging away and it was gratifying (if a little worrying) to see a lot of water micro-droplets sinking to the bottom of the clear bowl and to find very nice clear diesel emerging from the filter. The second photo shows the light-coloured 'water' layer below the clearer orange ('red') diesel. It was even clearer after it had passed through the filter element above the bowl.
This was going to be a slow process. The pump seemed to produce about one litre per minute and there were those 130 litres of diesel in the tank. I didn't actually need to run every single drop through the system, but I did want to try to get at least the worst out of the bottom of the tank. I did try gently rocking the boat to get the water layer to move around and get sucked up, and pouring the 'polished' diesel back into the tank will have helped to stir things up a bit. I lost count of the number of times that I drained off the water layer.
So, a few hours later, pump still running and the water droplets were even smaller and fewer in number, so perhaps this was the moment to stop the polishing and try running the engine. The idea was that any remaining gunge in the fuel pipework would get pulled through into the engine's fuel filter and then I could replace that and all should be well.
The engine started and ran quite well for several minutes, so that should have been enough to draw through any contaminants and I stopped it and changed the fuel filter.
But the engine would not re-start! I tried using the priming pump on the top of the Beta Marine's fuel filter housing, but it seemed unable to spring back up and draw in fuel. Did I now have a defective filter housing as well? So I removed the new filter and dismantled the filter housing to check: No, the priming pump was OK and the spring was working. So there must be a blockage in the fuel line.
I then tried using the Facet pump to pull through fuel to the fuel filter feed. No results! Checked the line back from the fuel filter to the water separator – all clear!
Then the line from the separator to the tank – not really clear, but it flowed a bit, releasing quite a lot of dark-coloured particles.
Could there be a blockage in the water separator? As far as I could remember, this was simply a metal bowl in which water droplets sank to the bottom and could be drawn off. I had drawn off a little water from here in the very earliest part of my investigation. But it seemed logical that there must be a blockage, so I dismantled it . . .
. . . to reveal this grotesquely clogged filter! Hardly surprising that no fuel was getting through! How on earth had ANY fuel got through for the last few days / weeks / months ?
It looked like I had found the true culprit, so I reassembled the water trap without any filter. This was the first time that I had opened the water separator since the boat was built in 2007. I had forgotten (if I ever knew) that there was a filter inside. No doubt it said so in the small print – which I will have read 16 years ago!
So, after some more lengthy bleeding out of air in the fuel line, the engine re-started successfully and was its customary responsive self, accelerating and decelerating as normal. With no filter in the water separator, any gunge was going straight to the engine's fuel filter, but I had already reckoned on that new filter element getting clogged up quite fast with bits from the fuel line, so that was OK as a temporary solution. I had a few spare elements ready!
PROBLEM SOLVED !! Quite a saga, but our suspicions of a water / diesel bug problem were confirmed, quite a lot of watery stuff and general gunge had been extracted and I had made sure to add some more of Marine 16's Diesel Bug Treatment and some of their Diesel Fuel Complete as I had returned the polished fuel to the tank.
. . . and there's a bonus to finish with! The only reason that I didn't throw away that ghastly clogged filter was that the marina's rubbish skips are only for domestic refuse, not for 'boaty' bits like used filters, so I took it home and emailed Beta Marine about buying a replacement. They responded nice and quickly, quoting a price and also saying "These are serviceable, and can be reused by rinsing in clean Diesel." Really? Could I really wash such a clogged-up filter and re-use it? Would a paper filter survive that? BUT IT WASN'T A PAPER FILTER ! Rinsing in clean diesel and then scrubbing with an old toothbrush revealed that this filter is made of a fine wire mesh which cleaned up very well. Not quite 'as new' but certainly undamaged and ready for several more years of service. Thank you, Beta Marine!
And, of course, we now have a simple fuel polishing setup that we can use to help eliminate water and gunge from Zindagi's fuel system for the future . . .
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