So a week or so ago when we were at Prince of Wales bay marina, I stripped down the water maker and replaced the membranes.

After reassembling it we had to leave it for a few days until we were in unpolluted seawater in Storm bay to test it, I found that there was a leak from the joining bobbin between the two desalination tubes, today I finally got back to it and stripped it down and stripped down and cleaned the o-rings on the joining bobbin and now we have no leaks. Yay 😊

So this afternoon we made our first water, at 30 litres per hour it’s not going to fill our tanks in a hurry considering we carry a thousand litres of fresh water.

But hopefully it’ll enable us to at least keep up with our usage and especially when we have excess solar power to burn in the tropics.

Basically, a desalenator works by pumping seawater at high pressure (800 psi) through a reverse osmosis tube, the pressure forces the fresh water to pass through the filter membranes and exit via the centre of the tube, the excess seawater is returned to the sea, slightly salter than when it entered the system.

Update: we ran the water maker a few days ago for around 2 hours and made approximately 70 litres of water for our tanks, at the time the solar was putting into our system as much as we were using, so no power was taken from the batteries.

PS

We are still in Ladies bay in Port Arthur. Looking at the weather for next week it isn’t the week for transiting  to the mainland so we are going to stay here for a few more days until some of it blows through and then we hopefully find a window where we will be able to travel North. Travelling North during the winter isn’t going to be the easiest and quickest way, but if we’re patient we will get wherever whenever 😀