I apologize that his is a bit off topic - but at least it deals with boats.
Has anyone every had to service the electronic tank monitors on the water or waste tanks on their boat or RV? (I'm assuming an RV tank monitor would work fine on a boat...)
I have a 40' cabin cruiser with a Fireboy Xintex monitor. The monitor has two sensors (fresh water tank, and waste tank). Each sensor has a two wire interface. It appears the sensors provide a resistance of somewhere between 33 to 220(?) ohms.
On my boat, both the water and waste displays show empty all the time. I disconnected the water tank sensor, and got a reading of basically zero resistance whether the tank had water in it or not. I then tried placing a couple of different resistance values in place of the resistor. Regardless of what I tried, I either got empty, or 100% full - couldn't get anything in between. So.... I'm assuming I may have bad sensors and a bad monitor.
I saw an advertisement for a different kind of sensor that uses foil strips taped to the side of the tank. The sensor measures the capacitance between the foil strips. I tested this scheme at home - taping a couple of foil strips to a tea pitcher, and then measuring the capacitance between the strips with a multimeter.
Amazingly - the concept worked great!!!! The capacitance readings were REALLY small (in the pico-farad range) - but definitely changed, and were linear. On the kitchen sink tea pitcher test - the results were wonderfully encouraging.
Unfortunately... not so much on the boat... I tried several different attempts to sense water levels on the real boat tanks. But couldn't get the foil strips to give a decent reading at all. My guess is that the tanks are just too thick for this scheme to work. But it is kinda' hard to tell for sure, since the tanks are HARD to get to, and the real water level is therefore really hard to determine.
SO.... Does anyone have any experience with tank monitors? Replacing sensors?
Do the monitors ever work more than a couple of years?
John
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Posted by: oak <oak_box@yahoo.com>
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