Carver Owners Forum

This maybe a stupid question but asking anyway. I have a 97 Carver 350 Mariner. If I hook my hose up to the dock freshwater and connect the other end of the hose to my boat, do I need to use the water pump or does it automatically pressurize with hose attached to the dock water? What about water heater? Thanks for any advise.

No such thing as stupid questions here! When you hook up to dockside, it pressurizes the whole water system except your tank. You leave your pump shut off. The water heater operation is the same whether you're running the pump or dockside water hookup.

May I add, be safe. Disconnect the hose when you leave the boat. It can fill up pretty quickly if a line breaks.

Considering this is the first time, I would check all the bilges after you connect to dockside water to double check there are no leaks at the start.....good luck with your boat.

waybomb wrote:Source of the post May I add, be safe. Disconnect the hose when you leave the boat. It can fill up pretty quickly if a line breaks.

99% of the time I use my onboard system. I forget the exact amount but when full my tanks carry 92 gallons of water. More than enough for most of my uses. The few times I do connect to dockside water I too always turn off the water at the faucet whenever I leave the boat for any amount of time.

We used to just use the onboard tank and periodically refill it, but every now and then get caught with less water in the tank than we though and have to run out and refill. After YEARS of doing it that way, I finally got a filter and connected the shore water directly, and for the last several years enjoyed that feature. It is another connection that has to be made on docking and unmade when leaving but the benefits in between made up for it. However, you do get a little sloppy with your water conservation skill which get honed when you're living tank-to-tank.

Our on-board pump is usually set to a higher pressure than our dock supply, so if we left the pump on while we had the shore connection hooked up we'd still drain the tank.

Sometimes having the extra pressure in the pump is valuable. A few times I'd connect the hose to the tank (to f supply it with water) while using the on-board pump for pressure. Sometimes in the peak of summer our dock pressure would be so low that washing the boat with weak pressure was a problem. Using the on-board pump to supply the hose pressure solved that.

I would also suggest bouncing between the shore water and the tank water. I've made the mistake of staying on shore water for a few weeks and the tank water doesn't get changed out. Then suddenly the tank water is funky and you don't notice it until you've left the dock and you're wondering why the sink smells like rotten eggs!
For sure the best advice is to shut off that shore water when you leave the boat. We had a dock neighbor sink his boat overnight. His bilge pump couldn't keep up with the leaking water system.

I most often use tank water in order to keep it moving.
When I travel and find myself at a transient dock I hook up to dockside water with an 'inline' water filter. As previously mentioned, shut off the power to your pump and the dock pressure takes care of the rest.
I too, shut off the water supply if we are going out for dinner, etc.
I also use the water filter when topping off the tanks.

https://www.westmarine.com/buy/west-mar ... ecordNum=1

Awesome advise from all. Thank you for the information. This group is awesome for new Carver owners learning the ins & outs of our boats. Much appreciated.

I use a quick connect fitting on my dock hose from Lowes, makes it quick and easy to disconnect when we leave.