Belt Drive Question

I was descaling and winterizing my belt drive hot water machine. When I put my water supply line into a 5 gallon bucket I build pressure and volume same as when I hook up to garden hose water supply but soon the pressure drops and the volume flowing back into my bucket slows significantly. I do not have this occur when I pressure wash using my buffer tank. I assume this is happening because I’m not building back pressure, is my assumption correct?

I’ve lost something there. Are you feeding it out of at gallon bucket?

It’s a pocket of air that needs to be primed out

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You are introducing air into the line. This does not happen with buffer tank because air had time to bubble to the top

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Don’t think it’s an air pocket. The 5 gallon bucket sits just below the water intake, that intake line stays submerged in water and is only maybe 18" long. The pressure hose then loops around and empty’s into that same bucket so the water cycles through the intake line, into the pressure washer then discharges into the bucket. As i mentioned, the flow and pressure is all good when I start the engine then slows significantly but always flows.

Take the bypass out of the bucket and see what happens. Why are you feeding or of a bucket anyways?

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Your machine is idled down when you’re attempting to draw the antifreeze from the bucket, correct? Belt drive machines do well at pulling fluid but head pressure still helps. With the bucket method, you’ve eliminated all head pressure and therefore the lower RPM’s when attempting to prime will help to pull the antifreeze up into the system. Machine idle should be at half throttle or even lower.

I never caught on that he was unhooking from the tank to pull antifreeze. When we travel and it drops below freezing at night I just drain the tank, dump in a gallon of anti freeze with a couple gallons of water and bump the starter until the line is charged.

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Thanks. I plan to descale and winterize a little differently next year. I had a small electric pump from Harbor Freight. I ended up using that to run acid through the heater, flush and get anti freeze throughout all. The parts to plumb it were pretty easy to put together and can re-use it and the method next year.

Innocentbystander: I feed from a bucket to get antifreeze into the power washer. There was a thread earlier about how much antifreeze to buy, if you use a small pump you only need a gallon or two, there isn’t much volume to fill the pump and hot water area.