Fuel, power, and water are the three things we constantly need to manage — aside from the weather, which we can only monitor. Fuel and power will be the subjects of another blog post. Today, we will share our insights on water management with you.
We think of water management in three components, which are:
Getting water involves getting water into our fresh water tank.
Maintaining water is all about ensuring the water in the tank isn’t or doesn’t get contaminated.
Delivering water to the water taps throughout the boat.
Freshwater At The Dock
We spend extended time at the dock, mostly during hurricane season and yard periods (when big things get fixed or upgraded). You might think getting water at the dock is the easiest, but you would be surprised. Unlike the water from our watermaker, which is automatically monitored for quality, the water from the tap on the dock — is a big unknown.
Because we can’t trust the quality of the water coming out of the tap, and we can’t risk contaminating our fresh water tank, we added a prefilter system. After an incredible amount of research, we chose the Clearwater Ultra, because it checked all the boxes.
Using City Water Pressure
We highly recommend against connecting your boat directly to the water tap and using the pressure from the city supply, primarily for three reasons.
Reason number one is that if a freshwater line on your boat breaks, your boat will fill up with water and sink. It has happened before and will happen again — just not to us.
Reason number two is that if you bypass your water pumps and tank, the water in the lines gets stale, and things grow in sitting water. Filling the fresh water tank and supplying water with the pumps and accumulator tank ensures water keeps moving and will not get stale.
Reason number three is that we always know the status of our freshwater system, and when we want to go cruise, we know that it’s working.
Freshwater while Cruising
On-board Patience, we have a Parker watermaker, which provides us with freshwater when we are cruising. Even if we spend a night at a marina, which is rare, we always use the watermaker when the water is clean — which it is in The Bahamas. Our number one watermaker-cruising tip is always top off your tanks because you never know when the watermaker runs into issues — like a clogged seawater inlet. If we are at a marine and need to use the water from the dock, we always use our Clearwater Ultra to prefilter the water.
Freshwater After the Tank
We know that the water in our tank is clean because it is either water from the watermaker or water from the dock, filtered by our Clearwater Ultra. After the tank, one of our two fresh water pumps, pumps the water through another water filter (just because) and a UV filter into an accumulator tank, ensuring continuous water pressure.
Key Takeaways
Our two takeaway recommendations are:
- Don’t connect your boat to the dock water directly
- Prefilter water that goes into your tank (we use a Clearwater Ultra)