Glass half full
We left the marina back on June 2 (our 31st anniversary) and sailed down to the Palm Beach area. We have been anchored out here for two and a half weeks now and we'll be here for a while longer. Our original plan was to stop here briefly to visit my nephew then keep heading south, but plans change.
The rest of my nephew's family will be down here for July 4, along with my parents. The week after that my brother and his family will be here. It seemed a shame to miss seeing everyone by a couple of weeks, so here we sit. The are some upsides to this. One is that we are right next to the Blue Heron Bridge which is great diving. Just a short dinghy ride and we are ready to dive. The second is we have found a few issues that we want to resolve before we leave the states and this is a great place to take care of those. A big issue has been our water maker. We never tested it before leaving the marina because we didn't want to run marina water through our water maker. There is no telling what it in that water.
As a couple, we go through about 10 gallons of water a day; that's 5 gallons each. That's pretty good considering an average user on land without watering their lawn or washing their car uses 60-80 gallons/day. Still, we can carry 170 gallons of water or 17 days worth. Every couple of weeks we would need to go to a marina to fill up. The other option is to find a source of drinking water where we can fill our two 5 gallon jugs then go back and forth 17 times. The water maker is kind of important.
Our water maker has been working o.k., but according to the
gauge, only making 3 gallons per hour which means that we would need to run it over three hours every day to cover our usage. At the current seawater temperature the
manual says we should be getting just over 5 gallon per hour which would cut the water maker run time to two hours a day. I’ve been
tracking down the problem all week and finally figured it out yesterday. I
could have saved a LOT of time on this project.
I started by checking the line pressure from the hp pump.
There is a gauge there and it was reading slightly low, about 750, instead of 800psi. I turned the knob to
increase that pressure and that had no effect on the water output. I checked
all the filters. First there is a seawater strainer. That was gummed up, so I
cleaned it, but that didn’t help. Next is a 5 micron filter. I had just
replaced that, so no problems there. Finally, the water maker filter. That is
also new.
I traced all the water lines to make sure there were no
kinks, both on the input and the output. Nope, all lines were routed smoothly. I
checked all the connections to make sure they were tight. Some felt a little
loose and I tighten them, but still no improvement.
Finally, I decided to clean the primary filter; a process
that takes nearly 2 hours and involves running two different chemicals through
the filter. Completed that, checked the gauge and it still showed 3
gallons/hour. Well, I know the filter is clean now.
Then it struck me that maybe, just maybe, the gauge was
wrong. I started the water maker, diverted the output into a quart measuring
cup and started my stopwatch. At 3 minutes the water was at the quart line. 4
quarts per gallon, so 3 minutes x 4 = 12 minutes/gallon. 60 minutes / 12
minutes/gallon = 5 gallons! So, after a week of spare time used up I found out
that the gauge was wrong and we are making 5 gallons/hour. At least next time I
know where to start.
