Commode tripping breaker

[Naut Home]

Hello
New boat owner. We have a 1997 Chaparel signature 31. The electric flush keeps tripping breaker. We will get it to work for a day or two before it stops again. Can anyone help?

[GordMay]

Greetings and welcome aboard the CF, Naut Home.

[Naut Home]

Thsnks

[tkeithlu]

Welcome to the forum, Naut Home.

There's a reason for it to trip. Most likely causes are interference with the motor turning and the motor itself dying. There's a messy job ahead of you. The basic route is to disassemble the motor/pump arrangement, looking for items like string around a shaft or other blockages that make it difficult for the motor to turn. Once that is all cleaned out, the motor should spin freely when you hook it up to a battery. If it doesn't, and you get sparks or grinding noises in the bearings, it's time to replace it.

Before you embark on that job, do two things. One, check the electrical connections leading to the head for loose or corroded ends. Second, get yourself an expoded view of the parts for your head as a guide to assembly.

Good luck with it. Remember - you are learning about your boat for the future.

[Naut Home]

Thanks for reply. A bit more info. This is the third instance of it to stop working. The first time the fuse was blow. We replaced it and it worked. The next time it stopped the fuse was intact and I think I just reset breaker button and it worked. The third time when we reset breaker button and attempt to flush the breaker seems to trip immediately.
The first two briefs fixes were after a couple days c away from boat; could the recharged batteries over those couple days be helping the flush? And then as battery charge dwindles during our boat ride cause it to trip?

[Naut Home]

Perhaps I'm wrong but since to will briefly work it would seen unlikely anything like string has bound up the motor.

[LittleWing77]

Originally Posted by tkeithlu

Before you embark on that job, do two things. One, check the electrical connections leading to the head for loose or corroded ends. Second, get yourself an expoded view of the parts for your head as a guide to assembly.

Keith,

This will expose my absolute ignorance about most things electrical, but going back to the check-the-easiest-things-first principle, could it be a bad/wrongly-sized fuse?

LittleWing77

[Naut Home]

Originally Posted by LittleWing77

Keith,

This will expose my absolute ignorance about most things electrical, but going back to the check-the-easiest-things-first principle, could it be a bad/wrongly-sized fuse?

LittleWing77

Fwiw I may not have replaced the burned out fuse with the correct fuse. I’ll need to check

[tkeithlu]

Good point, Naut Home, but I was envisioning something around the shaft that created friction and lugged the motor, rather than "anchor rode in the prop" sudden stall.

LittleWing, I'm guessing that it is unlikely that someone substituted a lower amperage fuse, and he's tripping a breaker as well.

It's a general hypothesis: Something interferes with rotation of the motor, overloading it, and then trips the breaker. Beyond that, it could be a bad connection, but something is eating up the amps.

[Naut Home]

The first time this happened my buddy redid the electric connection behind the toilet. He thought he may have cut the wires a bit short but believed the connection was good. After he redid the connection we found the blown fuse. I think that the fuse was the issue all along. So maybe the electric connection my buddy redid is faulty

[HeywoodJ]

Originally Posted by Naut Home

...could the recharged batteries over those couple days be helping the flush? And then as battery charge dwindles during our boat ride cause it to trip?

The short answer, yes. With a higher voltage from fully-charged batteries there is more power available and more room for voltage drop (from bad connections) before too much current is drawn. This does depend on the type of motor. Connections could be external (the one you already worked on) or internal (brushes if your motor has them). Remember, there are two legs to the circuit, people frequently clean up positive connections and don’t think about the negative ones, and yet they can cause just as much voltage drop.

[peghall]

All electric toilets should be on their own dedicated circuit with its own separate breaker, shared by nothing else--not even cabin lights--that can reduce power to the toilet. If yours is not on a separate dedicated circuit, it's possible that it's adding enough additional load to the circuit it's on to blow a fuse and/or breaker when whatever else is on that circuit is on, working fine when it's the only thing in use.


What's the make/model/approx age of your toilet? If you don't have the owners manual (it has all the wiring and plumbing specs), I can post a link to it.


--Peggie

[Bycrick]

If the system is new to you, you can’t trust anything.

1. Excess load on the motor. The string or excess paper or women's stuffcausing binding. Or bad bearings.

2. Bad connections. Could be anyplace. A bad connection anywhere can cause voltage drop which will increase the current. A bad connection at the fuse or circuit breaker can raise the temperature so that the fuse/breaker trips at a lower current.

3. The breaker itself can be old and trip at a lower current. The fuse may be the wrong size or maybe the wrong type: eg a fast-blow fuse rather than a slow-blow fuse.

[Naut Home]

Hi again
I’ve been away from boat came back to check toilet make and NOW flush bottom works after I reset fridge breaker.
My charger doesn’t charge all three bateries completely. It appears one of the charging lights always flashes no matter how much charging it SHOULD have received. I don’t know why. We had to replace all three batteries and maybe I didn’t quite get the linkage between batteries exactly correct. I think that after the draw from at least one battery resets or recharges a little when I return to the boat there then enough volts to flush the commode. But why is the question.
Any help would be great.

[Naut Home]

Is it possible that there isn’t enough voltage getting to flush button because when I replaced batteries I misattached one linkage negative battery cable?