How did water get in the ballast?

[meegwell]

My center (ski locker 242x) ballast somehow got water in it. I haven't (intentionally) used the ballast system. How Ould this happen and where do I drain it?

 

[haknslash]

Why not drain it using the ballast pump? If the boat is in your garage you’ll of course want to pull it out in the driveway before draining.

As for how it got in there I don’t know the plumbing details on the Yamaha. Is it possible you filled them by accident? If they use reversible ballast pumps I’m not sure how they would have filled the bag without the ballast pump impeller spinning.

 

[Dave burke]

Agree with @haknslash. There’s also a valve beside the bag you can close. This happened to me a couple of years ago, not sure how. I drained it with the pump and then closed the valve. Didn’t happen again

 

[haknslash]

They put a valve INSIDE the actual bag?! How and why? The shutoff valve should be between the thru hull fitting and the ballast pump. The shutoff valve should only be turned off if you are not intending on using the ballast system. If you run the pumps dry without water by accident with valve shut off you will eat up the ballast impeller and could damage the pump. Typically you use shutoff valve when you want to winterize the ballast system or shutoff the water flow in case of an emergency for some reason.

 

[Dave burke]

No valve is between the bag and the thru hull fitting. And you’re right, you need to be careful if you close the valve. In my case, I don’t use it very often so I keep the valve closed as a precaution.

 

[meegwell]

Dumn question sorry - where is the ballast pump and how do i activate it?

 

[Jim Davis]

On the connext screen you will see ballast on one of the screens. Hit drain all.

minute 1:30 gives some info. The valves are in the engine bay

 

[suke]

there's also a slide clamp. Really easy to pull the red slide back away from the bag to loosen it. Then pull the hose and let it drain into the bilge and out of the drain plug. Mine never seems to fully drain my ballast bag. There's always probably a gallon or so left in it. Which every now and again I'll just drain it fully like that.

 

[meegwell]

On the connext screen you will see ballast on one of the screens. Hit drain all.

minute 1:30 gives some info. The valves are in the engine bay

I for the life of me can't find any ballast information what so ever. I have the Drive Control screen, with several preset profiles, but nothing relating to draining ballasts.

Scratching my head...

 

[Jim Davis]

Thats strange. under the drive control screen I think mine is the third item down the list it says Ballast. If you click on the percent indication you should see the drain all and the fill level settings for each ballast tank. I am just assuming your 18 model is like my 2019.

 

[Cambo]

My center (ski locker 242x) ballast somehow got water in it. I haven't (intentionally) used the ballast system. How Ould this happen and where do I drain it?

In the engine compartment is a large valve to shut off the water flow that feeds the ballast pumps if its open the ski locker bag can cause a siphon effect and fill partially with water Yamaha designed these models with timers to fill and empty the bags. Your timer will think the bag is empty there is some way layers deep in the menu to force it to empty but has to be done repeatedly then the system needs to be calibrated. Or you can do it manually using a cable that my son and I made to deal with all the timer issues and a bunch of other things.

https://jetboaters.net/threads/ballast-pump-jumper-cable.19754/