Whirlpool leakage debugging
I have a whirlpool in the garden, which we took over from the former owner of the house. The whirlpool is bought from China.
After more than 7 years, it got a leakage somewhere and the water level was decreasing over time. So we had to take a look in the inside of the whirlpool.
To disassemble the whirlpool, one has to open the side, by pushing the side wall up a little bit, so that the wall hooks are free.
The wall hooks at the side of the whirlpool
Debugging
Once opened, we can see the inside of the whirlpool.
The inside of the whirlpool - a big tub with thermal isolation compound and jets attached
First, I could not see anything until I used a flashlight and found some dripping in the middle of the side, which I could not reach easily. To see if the dripping comes from a place I could reach, I used a stick and put it at the bottom of the dripping point to see if its origin is much more to my side - as the drips can be seen on the stick if moved at the bottom of the tube.
It seemed to come from this place in the middle, so I had to open the other side as well.
I also found out that it is only leaking if the whirlpool pumps are currently off - if they are on, nothing drips. Yet we have to open the side.
Down the rabbit hole
Unfortunately, the required side can not be easily disassembled as there are 2 tubes in the wall, as well as the heavy current power cable is part of this side. So I first had to detach these parts. After trying to turn the parts with my hands, I had to use tools to unplug the pipe from the wall. Two water pump pliers helped me remove this without breaking anything.
One side has pipes to the wall attached, which were quite hard to remove
So now we can have good access to the leakage right?
The leakage
I found a rusty bypass of the pipe which comes directly from the filter.
The leak is directly behind the filter. An additional flow is installed, which has some kind of sensor there
This was dripping quite a bit from the bottom of the plastic sensor. While it is possible to fix such dripping points without replacing or disassembling, I never had good experience with this and wanted to make it right.
Anyway, we first need to remove the water - so another part of yak-shaving is going on.
I need to loosen the nut from the small sink metal hose, to be able to remove the plastic part without breaking
I tried to disassemble the parts, but they were so rusty, that I could not make it.
The plastic part broke a little bit, so that I now need replacement for it. At least it is now removed - as it probably was the leaking part anyway, this is fine.
I finally removed the broken leaking part
Replacement part research
Now the real fun begins - finding the real purpose of the tool as well as finding a replacement part for it.
So the original supplier has some weird product names on the page I found - and there is nothing else I found about them, which is quite unfortunate. I wrote them a request anyway, and got a message that they would send a replacement part for $99 - that sounds way too much.
The tool seems to just be another water level check as found here:
Though I still do not know how this works - as I assumed that the pressure has to be the same in the inside as well as the outside.
Conclusion
Well, my project is stopped for now - I need to double-check its purpose and find a good replacement, before activating the whirlpool again.
Yet, a lot of debugging skills from software can be adapted to general problem solving in other areas as well. Though I really would have liked to spent the day differently.