Winterizing a Jabsco Flexible Impeller Bilge Pump

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

Mike: And I’m Mike Irving.

Jeff: Today we're going to show you how to winterize a flexible impeller bilge pump.

Mike: Gonna shoot down to Salem, Massachusetts to jump on to a commercial dive boat. I'll show you how to do it.

Jeff: Make sure you grab a couple of gallons of pink antifreeze and let's get out of here.

Mike: Alright, we're on The Gauntlet and I am actually standing in one of the lockers. This locker is usually dry, but you always want to have a pump in there just in case the water gets in there. It contains gear, lots of gear, scuba gear, anchor gear, stuff that bounces around. You couldn't put the centrifugal style pump in there. We needed to use an impeller pump, something self-priming. That impeller pump can draw the water up and out of the compartment, into the pump head, off the vessel. Wintertime comes, you still got to winterize that. What we do is we got ourselves a gallon antifreeze. You take that hose that goes into the compartment, put it right into the container, suck the fluid right out to winterize the system. It’s pretty easy and we'll show you how.

This is the pump we’re winterizing. The intake of this pump is in that gallon of antifreeze we just showed you, and we're going to go ahead and cut it on. You'll notice it's going to be a sound change. At first, it's sucking air when the antifreeze gets up into the pump, that's when we know we're good to go. The lines are winterized, and the pumps winterized.

All right, so what we just did is we brought antifreeze from that one-gallon container up to that impeller pump that's right behind me, through the system. Now you want to make sure that you run it long enough to do both the inlet side and the outlet side. But once you've got that done, you're good for the season. It's probably going to take you about a gallon or two gallons just to make sure you've got it all, but you'll be good after that.

Mike: That was pretty cool winterizing one of our pumps. What do you think?

Jeff: Really easy, Mike, it only took what maybe 15-20 minutes tops. All we did, we winterized our flexible impeller pump by taking the inlet and running it into a gallon of antifreeze. The one thing you want to keep in mind, make sure you run enough of it so that way you completely winterize the inlet and the discharge side of your system.

Mike: Well, that about wraps it up. I’m Mike Irving.

Jeff: And I'm Jeff Lander. Come back soon for more videos coming at you.