Good to have two gensets

As I said to Simon on Saturday, the previous owner went a bit OTT on the systems, doubling up on things; case in point, two 12kVA gensets is a bit much. But, the number of times I have been happy to have two gensets is not insignificant. Go ahead two days, and Monday morning I was happy again. Port genset, which had been running sweet, decided to issue a self-destruct command to the raw water pump.

I opened her up this morning, which turned out to be more involved than I had thought, since the hot water cylinder has been parked right next to the end of the genset. In the end I had to pull the covers apart and then remove the whole pump in order to get the impeller out. There was exactly half of one lobe left on it. Most of the rest were found jammed in the hose downstream, but a few are still unaccounted for - I'll have to open up the heat exchanger where they have no doubt found their way.

Having put in a new impeller on the port unit I decided I had better do the starboard unit as well, but once I took it all apart and found the impeller was fine I remembered that I had done it in California. Oh well, better safe than sorry.
 

The pump unit extends all the way out to the housing wall, so no way I could get in between it and the hot water cylinder to remove the impeller. Here I have removed the pump unit.

Hmmmm. That's not gonna move much water. Up until it died it had been spewing water out, so it must have been a wholesale spontaneous self-destruct.