Thread: 421 questions- please read

Noticed the gray water box has leaked down half way (overnight) into the waste tank. A valve somewhere not closing?

Originally Posted by Allstar

Noticed the gray water box has leaked down half way (overnight) into the waste tank. A valve somewhere not closing?

Likely the valve that is not closing is the high pressure solenoid that is mounted on the recovery tank. There is a repair kit available from demaengineering for this valve that should solve the problem. http://www.demaeng.com/product.php?id=87&catid=33 There is an easy way to check. With the recovery tank lid off, turn the machine on and let it heat up a bit for just a few minutes with the temp dial turned up a little to like 170 and diverter on. Then go inside and see if water is leaking or spurting into the recovery tank. If it is the repair kit will fix it. Now turn the temp dial on your machine all the way down and look again. If water streams into the recovery tank and stops when you turn the temp back up at least the valve is working, but is not closing all the way. A very small spring inside the valve is the likely culprit, but you have to buy the whole repair kit to get the spring. Sometimes you can dismantle the valve and the spring will have come out of place and can be put back, but that is just a quick fix. These valves are only rated for 200 degrees and if you continuously operate at higher temps you better keep a repair kit handy and maybe an extra valve.

The thermal relief valve can also cause leaking into the recovery tank and draining of the water box, but the things you described sound more like the solenoid problem. When the thermal relief valve is bad they usually just allow water to continuously flow into the recovery tank filling it up pretty fast. I have routed my thermal relief valve to my fresh water tank so even if it goes bad it won't cause me any problems. So far that is working out very well. This also makes it much easier to tell which valve is causing a problem because Hydramaster routed both valves to dump into the recovery tank at the same connection.

Btw, another symptom that the high pressure solenoid is bad is you will lose pressure at the wand because water is being dumped into the recovery tank. That will not happen when the thermal relief valve goes bad, but you may notice some drop in cleaning temps with a bad thermal valve.

3) Found very fine rubber shavings between engine & blower. Owners manuel says to check coupler(s). Should I be very concerned since machine now only has 110 hrs? I not sure what to check for or even where exactly they are?

curious how your experience went. I started a topic on this....My coupler flew apart completely at 106 hours And then started to separate again about 20 hours later. This is definitely a problem with these machines and Hydramaster does not seem concerned with their unreliable system. I will be looking at belt drive next time....simpler and easy to fix