I am trying to work on a older 3 phase horizontal separator. It has a microswitch on both the water and oil dumps. It has your float inside on one rod sitting inside another rod coming out to a housing. Inside the housing you have the rod with a u shaped connector looking like a tuning fork which then had the toggle switch coming off the microswitch and that toggle switch in between the top and bottom ends. When the oil level starts to get high the bottom arm will rise, hit the switch and dump valve opens and then closes once level goes down. My question is the dump valve will not stop dumping once the level has gone down. I have replaced the dump valve, microswitch and I maintain about 30 lps of back pressure on the vessel. Can you give me some kind of idea what to look for? I don't have much experience working on these types of dump valve controllers.

 

Is there a relay between the microswitch and the dump valve (microswitch drives the coil of the relay, relay contacts drive the dump valve) or the does the microswitch power the dump valve directly?

 

What you have is a float on a rod inside the separator. That rod sets inside another rod that comes outside of the separator to a u-shaped piece of metal that hits toggle on the microswitch. As the fluid level rises the u-shaped piece of metal goes down pushing on the toggle switch until it starts to dump. Once the fluid level has gone down the float goes back down allowing the toggle switch to go back to neutral stopping the dumping action then it starts over again. That rod is also connected to a camber which can be controlled by the nut causing it to be easier or harder for it to move freely.