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Keeping Your Bilge Water Clean

One of the dirtiest places on almost any boat is the bilge. All sorts of nasty stuff manages to find its way down hill into your boat’s lowest interior point.

Water, fuel, oil, transmission fluid, engine coolant, and just about any other liquid you use onboard tends to get here eventually, despite the most meticulous boat owner’s efforts to keep them out.

Hose clamps rattle just a little bit loose, gaskets start to go, and adding a quart of oil while upside down under your cockpit stairs often results in a few drips or more escaping, despite your best laid plans.

Unfortunately, these toxins usually find their way over the side when traditional bilge pumps kick in, pumping both the water they are designed to remove overboard right along with the bad stuff. Until recently boat owners who wanted to prevent this from happening had few options to help them, especially on older vessels that tend to leak more than newer ones.

While it would be nice to believe that every boater is conscientiously keeping an eye on their bilge, cleaning it every chance they get and preventing every toxic drip from happening in the first place, the reality is a different matter, of course.

Most boaters do use bilge socks and other absorbent devices to try and grab some of these toxins, and most of them work just fine, for a while.

Eventually, though, even the highest quality pad becomes saturated and loses its effectiveness. Routine monitoring of when you put a fresh sock down below, and keeping track of how long it is supposed to work, is a practice every responsible boat owner should apply.

But of course, we all get busy, and anyone who hasn’t vacuumed the coils on their refrigerator exactly on schedule is probably guilty of letting a bilge sock set a while longer than it should.

Recently, however, a revolutionary, though quite simple idea, has made pumping your bilge a much cleaner option.

Almost all bilge pumps operate the same, activating on a schedule or being triggered by a float switch when the bilge water level reaches a certain level. 

Once they turn on, your pump simply pushes whatever is in your bilge through a drain hose to a vent or thru-hull valve over the side.

Instead of using this traditional design, it is now easy to install a simple filter system between your pump and the outside water. Much like a fuel or oil filter is designed to remove impurities; bilge pump filters do the same, separating hydrocarbons from bilge water then sending just the water out through the drain.

These systems are simple to install in any out of the way area that works, require few if any moving parts, and only require occasional maintenance when the filter element gets full.

In addition to being the right thing to do, these pumps pay for themselves many times over when you consider the consequences of getting caught pumping oily bilge water.

Fines for dumping contaminants of any kind often run in the thousands of dollars these days in crowded harbors. Enforcement is on the rise, as it should be, to prevent this unnecessary damage from being done to waterways across the land.

So do the Earth a favor and consider installing a simple device to clean up your bilge water.