How to make water on a sailboat (and how to build your own watermaker) // Ryan’s tech corner #3

water water everywhere except we can't use it this is the big problem with ocean sailing we're in this huge body of water and none of it we can use for human consumption last year Sophie and I started to do a lot more extended anchoring and this was our single biggest limiting factor with angering as we didn't have a water maker on board we really had two options to get fresh water we could lift the anchor head into port fill up the tanks with the hose and head back out or we could take a dinghy into Shore with some jerrycans philic hands up bring him back fill up the tanks only problem with that was we didn't have any jerry cans so this winter we started to discuss the merits of buying a water maker went online and looked at a lot of name brands had a bunch of cool features and functions and we got really excited but they were all well outside of our budget with all the projects that we had going on on polar CEO we thought maybe this wasn't the right time for a water maker but one of you our viewers tipped us off to the DIY water maker path and that really got me thinking what is a water maker so that's what this series is all about in our first video we're gonna talk about what a water maker is what the different parts and components are and what they do we're also going to look at some pros and cons to name-brand water makers and the DIY path in our second video we're gonna actually install a water maker on polar seals so you'll get to see exactly how we did it and some of the thought process we went through in installing the water maker but for now sit back relax and enjoy your water so what is a water manner well a water maker is really just a fancy name for a big filtration system and we're trying to do is filtrate particulate out of the water particularly salt which is not good for us to drink after we do that we'll then have fresh clean drinking water which we can use for all kinds of stuff like 50 minute showers a fountain display in the B birth or even just washing our feet the water maker does this using two systems the first being just a normal filtration system like something you would find under your sink or maybe in a Brita filter the second part is reverse osmosis filter or a reverse osmosis membrane and you may be asking yourself for what is a reverse osmosis filter membrane osmosis or the process of osmosis is something that occurs naturally in nature so for example if I take a bucket of water and I put a membrane in that bucket and the membrane is just something that allows some particulate to flow through and not others and then let's say on one side of the membrane I put fresh water on the other side I put saltwater that fresh water naturally has a tendency to flow into the salt water and that's cost osmosis but what we want to do is get that salt out of the water so we want to reverse the process and for that we're going to use a reverse osmosis membrane and then we're also going to use some high pressure and some power to force the water through and make that process happen and we'll show you more about that later in the video so now that we know how a water maker works what we're going to do is take you through the entire process of a water maker we're going to start at the beginning from when we get salt water on our boat through the through Hall all the way from when we get fresh water out and put it into our water tanks and take you through each part in the system explain what it does and what happens when it goes on to the next part of the system [Music] so the first piece of our water maker puzzle is the through-hole and a through-hole is really just a hole in the boat that allows some type of fluid to either go in or outside of the boat we have a lot of different through halls on the boat we have a through hole and our sink to allow sink water to drain out we have a through-hole on our engine to allow saltwater to come in to cool the engine we even have some in the bathroom for a water maker what we're trying to do is get salt water from the outside of the boat in so we can do our magic salt water water maker process some manufacturers recommend that there is a dedicated through hall for their water makers others don't care and don't mind if you tap on to an existing through haul for polar seal we're actually going to use a through-hole that was made for our seawater foot pump this will allow us to not drill another hole in the boat and since we don't need the seawater foot pump because we'll have fresh water all over the boat we're going to use that through Hall that's already in place from the through Hall we're going to a sea water strainer and this would be similar to the strainer that you find in Jenin really what it's there for is to filter out big chunks of crud that might come in through the through-hole this could be anything from seaweed to big chunks of shark poop the next piece of the puzzle is a low pressure pump because parts of our water maker are going to be above the waterline we need a way to keep air bubbles from getting in the system and keep a really even flow of water throughout the system and to do that we're going to use this low pressure pump if we were to have all of our water maker below the waterline this maybe wouldn't be necessary but because our system is modular we're able to put pieces all over does having a low pressure pump it helps keep the water flow very stable and clean from the low pressure pump we're gonna go to a one-way valve and that's this little doohickey right here and I'm not gonna get into much about why there's a one-way valve here I'm gonna talk about that later in the video I promise but just know that we're gonna have a little one-way valve here after the one-way valve is going to be a series of water filters and that is these guys right here and these filters are here to filter out some more particulates on the first one it's a 20 micron filter so that means that anything below 20 microns in size will pass through anything above will be filtered out and then from that 20 micron we're gonna go to a 5 micron so we're filtering out even smaller particulate after the water filters we need to remember that the water is still salty and we need to have a way to get that salt out of the water and to do that we need to pump it through our membrane but the only way to get it through the membrane and a way to remove the salt is to have it under high pressure so from those filters we're going to take the water to a high pressure and to do that we're going to use the power of magic and now we have our high pressure pump so water will flow through here into this pump and that's going to increase the pressure anywhere between 600 and 800 psi which is a requirement for the membrane we'll talk about that in a minute from the high pressure pump we're going to go into a special hose and that's called the high pressure hose because we're operating under such high pressures we need to make sure that we have a hose that can handle those pressures if we were to use a garden hose or a normal water hose on the boat it would just erupt and explode so here we're going to use a specially designed hose that gets capable of 3,000 psi we're just using 900 so it should be able to take it and it has some special ends on it specifically designed to handle these pressures from the high pressure hose now we get to the part where the magic happens and we get to remove the salt from the system so we're talking about the reverse osmosis membrane and that really has two parts the first part is the high pressure vessel so if I can get my assistant to hand me the high pressure vessel Thank You Sophia so nice you're my Vanna White so the high perk Vanna White what if I know what one of our viewers will explain the reason we have a thing called a high pressure vessel is because if I were to take the membrane and put it inside let's say a cardboard tube when we put a lot of pressure in there the cardboard tube would just explode so we need to have a vessel that's capable of handling these pressures that we're talking about as well so this is specifically designed for that inside of the high pressure vessel we're going to have the actual membrane itself so Sophie this is the membrane that we're going to use the reverse osmosis membrane and this membrane right now is inside some packaging because we haven't installed our we we haven't installed our water maker yet so we kept it inside the packaging but this membrane will eventually go inside the pressure vessel on each side of the pressure vessel then there's some ends and these are specifically designed for these pressure vessels so you place this in this particular piece here is where the high pressure line will go and we'll put that in this side and then we have another end here and this will go on the other side of the membrane and this is what we're going to kind of call the crossroads and this is going to control the pressure inside the vessel and it's also going to be the discharge of our briny water our salty briny discharge and our fresh water and I will explain those pieces here this is where we actually control the pressure that's going through our reverse osmosis membrane so we'll have a pressure gauge and we can't roll that through a control valve here when we first start up our water maker we're going to have this control valve all the way open so there's really no pressure flowing through the system it's just water is moving through and as we start cranking this up it's going to increase the pressure that's where we get pressure built up inside our reverse osmosis membrane the water flowing through this pipe this end of the pipe is actually our brine and the brine is this salty sludgy kind of discharge that we're getting out of the reverse osmosis membrane so it's going to leave through this brien discharge valve and from here it's going to float through a pipe and off a through hole through the boat and off the boat we will hopefully never see it again we also here have a fresh water outlet so this fresh water outlet is going to producing all that awesome drinking water and fountain water that we're going to have in our v-berth that's going to go through a pipe and eventually go through a flow meter we want to know how much freshwater flow we have going into their tanks we want to know so we know how long it's going to take to fill or maybe we have an idea of how much water we need for that day this flow meter will give us that indication this one's set four gallons per hour but they have them in liters per hours well in theory the water right now should be good enough for us to drink so after this flow meter we could essentially just run a pipe to our water tank and have the water flowing through there but we want to have a way to test the water so we're gonna put a three-way valve into our system we don't have one today so through the magic of the internet we're gonna put one here and that three-way valves going to go two places one place is going to be to our sink and the next place is going to be to our freshwater tank so when we first turn our water maker on we're actually going to have this three-way valve selected to go to the sink and that's going to allow water to come through we'll be able to put a cup or a glass there and then we're going to be able to test the water and we test the water through this really cool device called a TSD monitor and TSD stands for total dissolved salts the TSD monitor is a way for us to measure the quality of the water that we're putting out minerals are not necessarily bad for us many of us drink mineral water which has solids inside of it but we need to make sure that the total amount of solids that are in our drinking water of below a certain level the World Health Organization has standards for TSD anything above one thousand milligrams per liter is considered poor or bad and shouldn't be drinkin if the amount is below 300 milligrams per liter that's considered excellent or really really good water and anything below 600 milligrams per liter is considered good so these are the targets that we're going to have and we'll be able to test that with this TSD monitor once we do that and we say okay our water is good we can then switch this three-way valve and have our water going into our freshwater tanks knowing that the water is good isn't contaminated or full of a bunch of salt so now we're done we have fresh water from salt water but are we really done the thing is the reverse osmosis membrane is really sensitive it's sensitive to all kinds of things like shock loading if we put too much pressure on it too quick but it also really needs to be used if we use it once and let it sit for a month it's going to go bad it will dry up and it'll have bacteria in it so we need to try to prevent that to increase the life of our reverse osmosis membrane so we have a way to do that onward polar seal and magically so the first piece of our flushing system is this timer and the timer is connected to our house water system and we can open the valve or set a time manually of how long that water should run or we can send a weekly amount and have it run once a week for maybe 10 minutes so that's the first piece of our flushing system the next piece is another one of these 10 inch filters and this one is a carbon filter so specifically why we need a carbon filter is because the reverse osmosis membrane is very sensitive to chemicals oil and chlorine especially so a scenario could be that our water tank is filled with half water from our water maker and half water from a marina tap and that marina tap may have a lot of chlorine in it if we fresh wash our reverse osmosis membrane with chlorinated water we can damage it running that water through a carbon filter will make sure that that clora chlorination is out and the water is safe to rinse with from there we're then going to connect it to this one-way valve which we talked about earlier in the video the one-way valve will then connect into these very fine looking filters which we saw earlier and go into our water maker system so these are the water filters the reason that we use one-way valves here is because we're going to have our salt water feeding through this pipe into the system if I didn't have a one-way valve here we would have salt water flowing both into our water maker but also into our fresh water system which could potentially contaminate it that's the reason for having these two one-way valves here if you're interested in the water maker there's generally two paths you can go and off-the-shelf system or a DIY system there's many different manufacturers of off-the-shelf systems spectra Rain Man echo tech to name a few these systems can generally run at a cost between five to ten thousand dollars but depending on size and options the reasons these can be so expensive is on the electronic side they may have means to start and stop the system automatically or other sensors included within they may also have different filters in order to keep the footprints ball and that may increase the cost of the system also some of these off-the-shelf systems have special energy recovery pumps which essentially allow the system to produce water using less electricity and those pumps come at a cost some of the advantages of these off-the-shelf systems is that they can have a smaller footprint that can be easier to install they can use a little bit less power and they can come with customer support sometimes good sometimes not so good but they can't come customer support but there's another way to do it and that's to build your own water maker and that's the path we've chosen on polar seal all of the parts that we've shown you today can be procured pretty much anywhere a hardware store a chandlery or on the Internet and obviously that comes with a substantial cost savings depending on the motor that you get or the pump that you get the cost can be anywhere between one to three thousand dollars and most of the cost is associated with the membrane the pressure vessel and the motor one of the pros this system is obviously the cost with a reduction of close to three times the amount it's easy to see why somebody may want to go that route and that's why we I'm polar seal went that route another pro of a system is that you're building it yourself so you know every aspect of the system which leads to the third Pro and that is that most of the parts that we've talked about today can be procured anywhere and that makes fixing and maintaining your water maker anywhere in the world so much easier we do have a few cons though with the iy systems one of which is efficiency because we may not have complex and enter recovery pumps the system may be less efficient so what I mean by that is that we're using more amps to create an amount of water versus maybe an off-the-shelf system uses a few less amps to create that same amount of water another con of the system is that we are going to have to spend a pretty significant amount of time scouring the internet to find all the parts or going to the hardware store and maybe something fits maybe something doesn't that takes time and it also takes time to build it we have to really think through the process before we get going but there might be a workaround for it there's a company called sea water Pro that has taken some of the guesswork and the internet searching out of DIY water maker kit think of it as the IKEA for water maker kids but with pronounceable names sea water Pro also gives you the option to include different types of motors or different types of pumps depending on your needs and one great thing about that is you could switch the pumps or the motor anytime you own the water maker for example sea water Pro has DC versions of motors available AC motors different types of pumps and different types of materials you can even add a second membrane to your water maker if you think that's necessary I'd like to give a shout out to Mike at sea water Pro he's really been service minded in helping us understand what a water maker is and what we need to look for when going on the DIY route so if you're interested in sea water Pro there's going to be a link below in this video you can click it and check it out and see what they're all about what you've seen in this video is a 12 volt motor with a brass pump in a single membrane but if you want to make a little bit more water you can add a second membrane to that in a coming video we're going to show you how to install a DIY water maker but in the meantime if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them in the comments section below if you like this video give it a thumbs up you like this series consider subscribing if you want to support our video production and help us make better technical videos go to Ryan and Sophie comm slash join the crew thank you for watching it was great having you here if you have a question remember to leave it below and I'll see you next time bye bye [Music]

Channel: Ryan & Sophie Sailing

Views: 171,839

Rating: 4.9498916 out of 5

Keywords: watermakers for boats, watermaker for sailboat, watermaker membrane, watermaker maintenance, watermaker sailing, watermaker install, how to build a watermaker, seawater pro watermaker, seawater pro watermaker review, seawater properties, seawater pro review, seawater pro kit, seawater desalination process, what is a watermaker for boats, how a watermaker works, how does a watermaker work, diy watermaker, diy watermaker for boat, diy watermaker sailing, diy watermaker kit

Id: tETjcFKccjM

Length: 18min 50sec (1130 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 09 2019