How to Empty Boat Sewer Waste for Maintenance

Video Transcript

"Hi. I'm Albert Hedgepeth with Expert Village. Today we are going to talk a little bit about boat maintenance. What we are going to talk about now is a macerator. A maceration system is used to chop up sewage that is on your boat and the discharge from your toilets and sinks and it chops it up into really small particles that you can actually dump out through the macerator pump through the bottom of the hull. What it is; you've got three different parts. You've got a seacock, which is right back here, which allows fresh water to come in through the pipe so that whenever you turn on the pump it can push all the water out through the hull. This is the actual holding tank for the waste system. What the macerator does is it will pull all of the materials out of the macerator or out of the tank and run them through the macerator and dump them out the hull. So, whenever you set up to actually dump the macerator you actually have to crawl up under here and make sure that your starboard side dump out is turned off. You have to now tell the holding tank that it is going to send the material to the macerator and not to the pump out tower. Most marinas actually have a pump out station where you can pump out the sewage rather than dumping it into the water. You shouldn't dump or discharge your macerator unless you are three miles out past the United States shoreline. If you are three miles out in the ocean and as long as it chops it up to one inch you are fine. You can go ahead and dump your sewage at that point. Do not dump it in marinas, definitely that is a bad thing, and don't dump it around where people are swimming because that is pretty gross. What you do is you get up under here and you turn the valve to tell it to send the material to the macerator. You then come down here and you're going to open the seacock and then you step in and turn the key."