When a harbor master called Nick Heyes to tell him his boat was sinking, the news came with a troubling twist. A persistent leak in the shaft seal had slowly filled the bilge with contaminated water. The pump eventually overloaded and failed, leaving the boat at risk and sending polluted discharge overboard without anyone knowing.
“That got me thinking,” said Heyes, managing director of Digital Yacht. “Our company creates connected solutions for boaters, and yet my own boat nearly sank and was discharging polluted bilge water simply because I didn’t know the bilge pump had failed. There had to be a solution.”
That incident kicked off the development of Bilge iQ, a new intelligent bilge monitoring and environmental protection system that has since earned major industry awards.
Bilge iQ connects to any bilge pump through NMEA 2000 and displays pump status on a vessel’s multifunction display. Owners can control the pump from the MFD or use standard NMEA switching commands. A built-in wireless interface allows monitoring from a phone or tablet, giving boaters access to pump activity, current draw, cycle logs, and alarms for dry-run events, long run times, or pump failures. Bilge iQ also integrates with Victron Cerbo systems to enable remote oversight through the free VRM cloud platform.
“We developed a solution that allows boat owners to monitor and control the bilge pump,” Heyes said. “A sinking boat obviously poses major environmental risks, but on a day to day basis unmonitored bilge discharge is a problem.”
To address that broader concern, Digital Yacht partnered with Wave International, maker of Lloyd’s Register-approved Wavestream bilge filters. Wavestream units remove hydrocarbons and other contaminants down to 5 ppm, a level often required in marine protection zones and inland waterways.
“Digital Yacht contacted us about integrating the Wavestream filter into the Bilge iQ to create a comprehensive solution which would not only protect owners’ boats but also protect the environment,” said Paul Gullett, managing director of Wave International. “It ensures only clean water is pumped overboard.”
The combined system launched in September and was named Best New Product by the NMEA. In November, Bilge iQ earned the DAME Design Award for Environmental Design as well as a special mention for On Board Safety.
For boatowners, the solution offers something long overdue: a smarter way to keep water out of the boat and pollution out of the sea.
