NMEA 2025: Digital Yacht Bilge IQ
Last week, the National Marine Electronics Association (NMEA) held their annual conference in West Palm Beach. This year’s conference featured quite a few interesting product introductions. I had the opportunity to see most of them while helping judge the NMEA’s Best New Product and NMEA Technology Awards. I plan several articles covering the various product introductions, though I’ll have to be quick about it as IBEX begins next week. Digital Yacht’s Bilge IQ is a NMEA 2000 and WiFi connected bilge pump control and monitoring system. The clever system monitors bilge pump activations, runtime, and current draw. My fellow judges and I thought enough of it to give it the Best New Product award. What did we see that intrigued us enough to award it? Let’s take a look.
Bilge IQ installs between your bilge pump, its float switch, and power wiring. Bilge IQ monitors the pump for activations, measures activations, runtime, amperage, and voltage. Alerts can be configured based on all the measured parameters. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen bilge pump monitoring include current measurement and I often wonder why it isn’t more common. In many respects, current tells the story of what the pump is doing. If the pump is freewheeling, it will draw relatively little current, if it’s pumping water, it will draw around the rated current, and if it’s jammed with debris or has a locked rotor, it will draw significantly more than rated current.
Bilge IQ comes in a water tight enclosure and connects to the pump, float switch and power source. The NMEA 2000 connection is on the bottom of the device with inbound power coming from the left and leads out to the pump on the right.
Bilge IQ utilizes NMEA 2000’s built-in alerting PGNs to provide onboard notifications of issues. Unfortunately, and as Digital Yacht has highlighted for some time, NMEA 2000 alerts are not well supported, although that is getting better, albeit slowly. Currently, those alerts will be seen on other Digital Yacht equipment, Garmin and Raymarine chart plotters, Maretron displays, and possibly a few other components. Unfortunately, as of this writing, it is my understanding that Navico and Furuno come up short in alert support. Bilge IQ generates NMEA 2000 alerts for the following statuses:
- Bilge pump running
- Bilge pump running dry
- Bilge pump not running, but float switch on
- Bilge pump float switch failure
- Bilge water at second high water float switch level
- Bilge pump high current
- Bilge pump low voltage
In addition to alerts, Digital Yacht advertises NMEA 2000 digital switching compatibility. I expect that the unit will create a digital switching channel for the bilge pump. If the bilge pump is running, that channel’s status will indicate accordingly.
Lastly, Bilge IQ will integrate with a Victron GX installation connected to the NMEA 2000 network. That integration allows remote monitoring of bilge pump activations and alerts through the Victron GX ecosystem including Cerbos, Ekranos, and other devices running Victron’s Venus OS connected to VRM.
The launch model of Bilge IQ supports 12 and 24 volt pumps with a maximum current draw of 10 amps. Bilge IQ should retail for around $249 U.S. and will be available in November.
Good morning Ben,
I currently have 5 bilge pumps from forward collision locker to aft Lazarette and engine compartments. I’m assuming I would need a unit for each individual pump???
Would this also tie into my Water witch high water alarm in some fashion???
John
John,
You’re correct, you would need one Bilge IQ per bilge pump. However, I am not sure you would need to equip all five pumps with Bilge IQ. Most boats I’ve come across drain to one or two pumps. Effectively, if those pumps aren’t running, the others aren’t either.
I don’t know that there’s a way to tie into your Water Witch, although I think you could use the Water Witch switches as the secondary, high water indicators.
-Ben S.
And if the smart device fails, does the bilge pump still function? That seems like a key question.
Why would you choose a few of these (we would need 4-6!) vs an mPower box and attach a waterwitch to digital input, and then you get more and extra digital switching for what seems a cheaper price? I can see ab benefit to 1, perhaps two bilge pumps but any more then it seems overpriced
If your using an automatic bilge pump (internal float) can the current readings be used to trigger alarms?
If the needs are large enough, you have the capabilities, and the wiring is centralized, there is likely to be a better solution. But, if you’re only monitoring a few pumps, this is going be more cost effective and will require much less programming to provide the alert functionality. Additionally, unless you add other components, like something to log and report on the circuit consumption, you’re not going to get the historical perspective that BilgeIQ offers.
-Ben S.
Nice idea except I have a computer driven bilge pump no float switch…
And, I have a so-called smart bilge pump in the motor-bay under my 20kW PMAC that would benefit the most from some pump ‘monitoring’….
No doubt not all bilge pump control systems will work. There are myriad high and low tech bilge pump configurations out there. Most will work with BilgeIQ, but some won’t.
-Ben S.