Why Does My Shurflo Water Pump Keep Breaking?

This is a question we’ve asked ourself many times over the past three years. Shurflo water pumps are a top pick for van lifers in their builds, likely due to their reputation, competitive price, and ease of purchase on amazon. These are the reasons why we went with Shurflo in our Ford Transit build even though we had problems with the same model in our old Ford Econoline.

The Shurflo 2088-343-135 pump we purchased in March 2023 stopped working one year later. We made the decision to buy the same model so that it would seamlessly fit into our system. Alarmingly, the new pump stopped working in August 2024, a whopping five months after purchase. This time, it slowly died allowing us the opportunity to diagnosis the issue.

We found that when we jiggled the positive red wire it’d work, and continue working from a few hours up to a few days. When that stopped working, we checked the fuse to find that it blew. We cycled through this process for a few weeks until the pump completely died.

We detached the pump from our system to find that our wire connector had completely fried! Through tedious googling, we found a video that helped solve our problem. Our pressure switch had failed, an expected issue 1-3 years after pump purchase, however it can break more quickly when the pump is used for both sink and shower water. We ordered a new upper housing unit for $34 from Amazon. It took about 15 minutes to switch out the upper housing. That hardest part was diagnosing the issue, we now know what to do when this happens in the future.