How to Properly Seal a Rule Bilge Pump Wire

Here we explain how to seal the manual override wire (the brown and white striped one) on our Rule Automatic Bilge Pumps and Rule-Mate bilge pumps if you're unable to use it. It's important to properly seal the end of the wire so that water won't damage the pump. We'll show you one way to close off the end of the wire with silicone caulking, heat shrink tubing, and a heat gun.

 

How to Properly Seal a Rule Bilge Pump Wire 3:31

Jeff: Thanks for watching jabscotech.com. I'm Jeff Lander. 

Mike: And I'm Mike Irving. 

Jeff: And today, we're going to talk about the brown and white wire on our computerized and our Rule-Mate bilge pumps.

Mike: Now the big question is, is what is it and do you need it?

Jeff: Well, Mike, the brown and white wire is actually our manual override wire. And do you need to use it?

Mike: Not really. In some vessels like a dinghy or a small rowboat, you don't have that option of having a panel switch so you can run the brown wire straight to the battery. If you don't want to use the brown and white wire, we recommend that you seal it off. Maybe some silicone caulking and some heat shrink tubing and we'll show you how to do that. 

So here we have our Rule-Mate 1100. All of our computerized pumps and the Rule-Mate pumps have that brown and white wire. We've got some silicone caulking and some heat shrink tubing. Adhesive lined is better. And we also have on the side a heat gun. This is the heat shrink tube; can slide that down. With your silicone caulking give a good dose of it; make sure we get it all around. Slide this down and over. Make sure you don’t scrape a whole bunch of that caulking off. And the end of the wires right about there, about midway. Use the heat gun.

See, it's pretty neat because you can actually see the silicone there. The silicone there it's oozing out and this is a nice tight fit. This is going to prevent any water from coming down the wire. The wire is blocked wire but this gives you another layer of protection. 

We showed you how easy it was to go ahead and seal off the end of this brown and white wire if you don't want to use it. There's no reason that you can't do this. So, some heat shrink tubing preferably and a little bit of silicone caulking. Well, Jeff, what do?

Jeff: That pretty much wraps it up. One more thing. If you don't want to use the brown and white wire, don't just hook it up with the brown wire, because what that will do is that will cause it to pump continuously. So, like Mike said, if you don't want to use it, make sure you seal it up. That concludes this episode of jabscotech.com. I'm Jeff Lander.

Mike: And I’m Mike Irving.

Jeff: Come back soon; we'll have some more videos for you.