In the present study, the application of SVM algorithm in the field of fault diagnosis and condition monitoring is discussed. The continuous wavelet transforms are calculated for different families and at different levels. The computed transformation coefficients form the feature set for the classification of good and faulty conditions of the components of centrifugal pump. The classification accuracies of different continuous wavelet families at different levels are calculated and compared to find the best wavelet for the fault diagnosis of the monoblock centrifugal pump. © Copyright 2016 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.