Dredge Overloading Solution
In order to resolve this problem you can pretty much do the same as before. You can flush the section tube with water and as soon as the gravel begins to move and speed up enough, you can begin to dredge again however not in such great amounts. This kind of overloading happens more often when the ejector is positioned under the surface and usually overloading does not happen in the first ten feet of depth.
Overloading is mainly problematic when it comes to the underwater sluice. Because of the nature of the underwater sluice, the diver usually does not check the riffles until it is time to dump them. If the suction tube has been overloaded the operator may have wasted a good amount of time doing nothing else but running sand over riffles that have gotten plugged up. It is a good idea to check the riffles on an underwater sluice a little while after you have started dredging to make sure you are not overloading the suction tube on the kind of material you are working with. In most cases it takes a good amount of time and experience for a person to become skillful at estimating the amount of material that is going to be sucked up at any given time. Because of this issue, most of the underwater sluices these days are used to get rid of excessive overburden where there may be low values. When a dredger is closer to bedrock he will usually switch to the surface sluice since this causes less problems to deal with.
Due to the fact that overloading happens in greater depths, most dredgers will rarely have to deal with them. The problems of the average dredger are the ones related to too much speed and water in the sluice causing the materials in it to get washed out.
There is one issue that is problematic for almost everyone and it has to do with out and out obstruction. It is not always that easy to get rid of obstructions however in most cases they do not cause a great deal of slowdowns. Obstructions can be caused by almost anything type of matter that is solid such as sticks, leaves, boards, and many, many other things. However in most cases obstructions are caused by elongated stones that go inside the suction nozzle and showing the narrow side and then twist themselves inside the tube and get wedged in.
If this occurs the first thing you will need to do is try to separate the general area the obstruction is in. if this area just so happens to be on top of the jet, the supply of water that is supposed to get to the sluice will not be sufficient, and the suction will slow down or stop all together in some situations, the obstruction can be so big in some occasions that it shuts the flow of the jet down and causes it to reverse and the pushes the water flow out of the suction nozzle with a great amount of force.