Vandog Traveller

Quit job, build campervan, travel

Installing the Shurflo water pump – reduce the noise

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Today I installed my Shurflo water pump straight onto the wall of the van but when I switched it on, I couldn’t believe the noise coming from this thing! it transmitted around the full van. I realised that, ideally, these pumps should be mounted on solid floor or on any solid structural members to prevent vibrations being amplified through the rest of the structure.  Pump noise was something I didn’t think about but after a while of experimenting I came up with a simple and really effective solution:

hang the pump rather than fix down with screws in order to isolate vibrations

pump-and-accumulator
Fiamma 70L tank to Shurflo 30PSI pump into a A20 accumulator before being split for hot and cold feeds

 

See the rest of the water system installation here

 

Here’s how I made my water pump run super quiet

I found a nice trick for mounting the Shurflo diaphragm pump onto any noisy surfaces or any surface that may transmit vibrations round the van. I couldn’t find much on the net about pump mounting techniques with the aim of reducing operation noise and I certainly haven’t seen anyone use this method of mounting. If you have the same problem as i did then maybe you should give this a go…

pump-mounting-board
The first thing I did was to mount the pump on a piece of wood and then fix the wood to the cladding wall with 6 screws. I used a layer of bitumen tape and carpet on each of the 6 screw mounting holes to sandwich between the board and the wall. This reduced transmitted vibrations into the boomy wall a fair amount but it was STILL too noisy…
shurflo-pump-noisy-mounting
I mounted the pump with screws on to some more bitumen tape and square of carpet. STILL too noisy!
shurflo-pump-quiet-mounting
I messed around and tried all sorts of combinations. I held the pump in my hand this thing is surprisingly quiet when it isn’t touching anything. The solution to my noise problem was to hang the pump – why not? it works great. I got rid of the screws and used some electrical wire to hang it

 

Hopefully this helps anyone who has a similar problem with pump vibrations and noise