Shortly after 3pm today our watermaker produced it’s first fresh water. The leaks have been fixed and almost everything connected up. In all honestly it’s pretty tasteless as it is very close to distilled water. However, the thought that it is our own home made water and that it certainly doesn’t taste like the chlorinated water we picked up from Nanny Cay permits it to be called delicious.
For now we have drunk our fill and filled up a spare bottle. In theory we could now go wild and drain our tanks and refill with fresh water. However, the energy for this will come from the batteries which can only be replenished from diesel right now. So we’ll continue to run the water maker just to fill our bottles until we have the solar panels installed or we run out of on board water.
The job isn’t entirely complete. The control panel still needs to be mounted and we need to install the cross line to the port tank. We are going to first try a gravity based distribution system. The watermaker is set up (although not currently connected) to feed into to the overflow pipe from the starboard water tank. This allows water to spill out when overfilling from the deck (or the watermaker). The height of the vent is higher than the highest point a cross connection would have to go so when the starboard water tank is full, rather than venting off, the fresh water should flow to the other side of the boat and feed the port tank. We’ll see. The alternative is a valve but we’ll try to avoid that.
On the positive side we’ve also sealed the probable source of the earlier found leak. In a days time some more testing will be performed.
On the down side I’ve lost a couple of features on my digital camera. The first feature I discovered not to work was the fact that it is supposed to be waterproof down to 30 feet. I had gone under the boat to take pics of the through hulls. The second feature to shutdown was the display. It still take pics but without a viewfinder it’s all point and hope. And there’s no way to change settings unless I push buttons and work from memory. Maybe it’ll self right when dried out.
For now, just a few extra pics of the installed water maker and our first cup.
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