Weep - help a newbie

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I'm really new to the car wash game (5 days). The previous owner said the system worked and the helpful service company said 'I know nothing about the Weepmizer, just Google it'. The temperature just dipped down to 27 degrees. I can hear what I think is a solenoid kicking on but there is no weep coming out of the wands. Here's a cruddy picture of setup. Of course it's now plugged into the power. The arrow is pointing to a hose that goes to an open valve and a broken piece of pipe laying on the floor next to the drain. The other side of the valve seems to feed back into the rinse tank on the pump stand. My guess is that at some point the broken pipe laying by the floor drain actually was connected to a water source. Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[Greg Pack]

Welcome to the business.

From the pictures it's a little hard to tell which side is the input side. I'm assuming the hose coming in on the left side is the input because it shows 40 psi on the pressure gauge. You can look at both the solenoid and the regulator to determine the direction of intended water flow. The solenoid SHOULD be a normally open solenoid and should be flowing water when the weepmizer is unplugged. This is for safety to prevent a freeze up in the event of a power outage.

So the input side of this assembly needs to be connected to a pressurized water source. The output side should be connected to a manifold that usually supplies water to each individual high pressure bay pump. I think that is the red hose near your water tank. There should be a small line connected to a check valve somewhere on front of each pump, follow that backward and hopefully they will all lead to the same manifold. Some systems may also weep foam brushes and foaming conditioner guns.

Once it gets down to (I think) 37 the weep will start to turn on a few seconds per minute, the colder it gets, the longer the weep will run- about 50% of the time at around 27, and will run continuously in the high teens.

Unless you're in South Florida or San Diego, a service company that doesn't know anything about weepmizers would concern me about their overall knowledge level. That's like "self serve 102".

 

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Thank you for the info. I'll try to trace the hose on the left again but I'm fairly certain it was connected to the rinse tank on the pump stand. I'm in Missouri so we are blessed with below zero temps as well as weeks over 100 in the summer. So I really need to get the weep system lined out and then on to some insulation and possibly heat tape in the trough. I may have to break down and call the service company again but this time insist they send someone that knows the system.

 

[Dan kamsickas]

Here's a simple explanation of the a basic weep function:

Incoming water feeds a normally open solenoid.
That solenoid is controlled by the Weepmizer.
When it's warmer the Weepmizer energizes the solenoid to shut it off.
When the solenoid is open it is feeds water to each bay through a check valve.

It can get more complicated than that but this is the basics.

In the one picture it looks like the solenoid is feeding the rinse tank. That is going to do absolutely nothing but overflow that tank. It really looks like someone tried to field engineer something and didn't know what they were doing.

 

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Thank you, I traced the output line on the left and it leads to the manifold pictured. The three manifold outputs ran to the lines out to each bay wand. So I connected the hose on the right side that was laying on the floo, to a water source. Pesto, the wands were weeping. However even though I could hear the solenoid clicking when I either plugged the weepmizer in or set the output to on, the weep continued to run. Maybe a bad valve?

 

[Greg Pack]

Yes, if the weep is running and you hear the solenoid clicking it is potentially bad. You can try disassembling and cleaning. If that doesn't work a replacement is in order. You want a normally open solenoid with the same voltage that is currently being powered by the weepmizer to the current coil, usually 24VAC. Also want to make sure the plumbing is the same diameter, they are usually 1/2". I ve had better luck with GC brand NO solenoids than Dema.

 

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Thank you. I'll see what I can come up with but may have to order one.