So we are in full swing with the boating season, and I had some time yesterday to try to get some more break-in hours on the boat. I was going to try to calibrate the ballast timers, but ran into some issues. Lets talk about one of the rear locker bags for just a second. Initially I believe the timers are setup at 4:30 or whatever. So I fill the bag up all the way until the system believes the bag to be 100% full and it automatically shuts off by itself. Then I go look at the bag and its only maybe 60% full, which I was totally expecting. So I go into the menu and turn up the timer to like 7:00 (or whatever). As soon as you turn the timer up the boat now correctly thinks that the bag is only 60%, as shown on the display. So I hit "fill" again untill the boat thinks the bag is full and shuts off the pump automatically. Perfect. Sac is full and display verifies this. Then I go to empty the bag and the boat runs the pump until the display says 0% full, well I go look at the bag and its got maybe 40-50% left in it. Now youre kind of screwed because you cant turn the pumps back on anymore due to the timer thinking the sac is empty. So I go turn the timer up like 13:00 or whatever and now the boat correctly believes the bag still has 40% left in it. So I get the bag mostly empty, but Im sure you can see my problem here, I dont want the timer set on 13:00 because it would just be dumping water out of the bag when I went to go fill again. So I have a couple questions...
1. How would YOU empty the bag? I ended up just letting it drain into the bottom of the boat at letting the bilge pump it out. I didnt have my tsunami pump on the boat at the time but that would have been an option I suppose.
2. I noticed on the calibration menu there being 3 different options for calibrating the pumps. Obvioulsy you can use the menu item where it just allows you to chage the timers, but there are two other calibration menus. One was called "lake calibration" and the other one was called "factory calibration." Of course there isnt any information in the owner's manual on these, but I spent about 5 minutes trying to screw with them while I was stuck on the lake with full ballast and it was absolutely squalling/raining at this point we just had to get off the water. Anyone know anything about these menus?
The second part of this that I thought was interesting was calibrating the center hard tank. I initially filled this one on whatever the factory setting was. You cant see the tank so you are kind of relying on waiting for water to come out of the overflow. So when I initially went to fill up the center tank, it gets to 100% or whatever on the display and obviously its not full yet because its not pouring out the side. So I turn the timer up to like 7:00. Well the display gets up to about 88% full and I see the water pouring out. I turn off the pump and drop the timer back down to where the display thinks the bag is 100% full. Wrong. I "empty" the center hard tank until it says 0%. I get back to the house and later find out that with the key OFF you can run the pumps for like 30 seconds at a time. I must have turned the center drain pump on like 5 times. Theres no telling how much water was in that tank but it was a lot.
One thing I really dont like about this boat is that when you are emptying the ballast, it spits the water out the bottom of the boat into the lake. Gone are the days where you can physically see the water coming out of a thru-hull. This really bugs me because now I dont trust the system and theres no way to see how much level is actually in the hard tank. I kind of miss the ski locker and bag that was in my 05 because you could verify. Sorry this was so long, maybe the posts on this thread will help someone else out too. Im taking the boat out again friday, so Id like to have some kind of gameplan to figure out whats going on. I really appreciate the responses in advance.
