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Installing the Shurflo water pump – reduce the noise

December 18, 2013 by Mike 5 Comments

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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

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Filed Under: Converting my van Tagged With: uk, van conversion

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Comments

  1. Trevor Laporte says

    February 1, 2014 at 12:19 am

    You should try some Dynamat or similar brand or sound dampening. They use it in professional car audio applications to prevent any vibration of the body that could contaminate the sound for the listener. With consumer products reaching easily 140db+ im sure a few patches or the mat here could easily solve your problem.

    Reply
    • Mike Hudson says

      February 1, 2014 at 1:30 am

      Hey Trevor, thanks for the comment! This is how I thought I’d solve it at first but the problem was with the screws used to fix the pump down. No matter how much sound deadening I used, a substantial amount of vibrations seemed to get transmitted through the screws and amplified by the wall. I’m pretty sure the Dynamat stuff is just bitumen as well. Did you see my post on sound deadening? https://vandogtraveller.com/sound-insulation-van/

      Reply
  2. Mike says

    July 16, 2015 at 10:02 pm

    Hi van dog,my brother in law mounted his pump on part of a truck mudflap that is attached to a subframe under the motorhome,you can not here it running game at all.I am just doing the same with a van I have bought,it was screwed to the wall,very noisy.cheers mike.

    Reply
  3. Mike says

    July 16, 2015 at 10:05 pm

    My brother in law mounted his pump to part of a truck mudflap attached to a subframe member,can,t here the pump running.cheers

    Reply

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