Friday, November 13, 2020

Making water and some related thoughts part 2...

An election of note, a state of affairs I'd never have imagined, and since we're on the subject of Covid-19...

Back when, I used to work in a marine consignment store which taught me a whole lot about which boat products were good and which were, shall we say, problematic.

As it happens, we always had a lot of watermakers and various watermaker components on consignment and just about all of them had their very own horror story of how they wound up on our shelves. The funny thing was we never had anyone bringing in DIY watermakers but what we did get was top of the line very expensive gear that, for one reason or another, didn't work or required work or parts that were too expensive to put right.

Part of the problem was watermakers were marketed as being very high tech systems which required some sort of arcane rocket science skills to operate. The companies involved in making marine watermakers did their very best to keep folks from realizing just how simple a watermaker actually is. Which resulted in a lot of needless tech being added to make things simpler but actually made them much more prone to failure.

The thing is, a watermaker is just seawater being pumped through a couple of filters which then goes through a high pressure pump into a membrane which separates some freshwater from the seawater with a pressure regulator (which is really just a valve), a pressure gauge, and a flow meter. Can't really get much simpler than that now can we?

I mean, seriously, that's only a couple of switches on the pumps and a knob to turn until you hit the 800 psi mark on the pressure gauge. Dead simple.

Of course, anything you add to make such a simple system easier to use actually winds up resulting in more, not less complication and a much higher incidence of system failure. Most all of those consignment watermakers were there because one of those added features failed. 

Which is something you might want to think about where watermaking systems or any boat system is concerned.

Next up on the subject is putting together a very simple bombproof system and what it all actually costs.

Listening to the Spring Breaks

So it goes...