Sea Recovery 600gpd soft water?

Hi,

If you are using a lot of RO Water and have copper pipes or HW Heater liner you would do well to add a limestone filter to the product line to re harden the water a bit, soft RO Water is well known to deteriorate copper when used solely.

Hi,

RO Water is just basically very finely filtered water.

Removing everything bigger than the water molecules that can pass the filters rips out a lot of minerals which makes the product slightly acid.

This will make pinholes in your copper parts in time.

Interesting thread.
There's this Dutchman who was going to convert a fishing trawler into a super yacht. He has a blog where he wrote about almost everything that came to play with this project. Here's the post about making water and 'upgrading' it for human consumption.

We have 900gpd headachemaker* from sea recovery and have a charcoal filter and a PH cartridge in the output line. The PH filter restores some of the minerals missing from the water.


* just replaced the expensive touchscreen control board, 2nd in 3 years... Touchscreen has lines on it... And occasionally throws error codes on power up...

Hi,

RO Water straight out of the machine on a boat isn't something I would be in much of a hurry to drink myself.

The std treatment on way to consumers used to be UV Sterilisation, nowadays for vessels that have to comply with them there are rules and regs that require the use of something to treat the water on the way to the storage tanks and then UV on the way to the consumers.

Chlorine is the cheap and cheerful way to get past these. Silver Ion or Copper and Silver Ion treatment is another way.

Yeah with the PH cartridge the water is just as hard as the average dock water..

I had the UV light installed on the water coming out of the tank instead of on the WM output this way everything is treated. We also have a charcoal filter on the tank output

I don't work on any yachts where only RO water is used, and they have copper lines. But this is very good info to know, I didn't know this.

Yeah, be ready to replace a fitting in about 300 years.

Yeah, and that wonderful touchscreen control board is around $2400. I had one that kept throwing high salinity, we changed the sensor and it still read high salinity. We unhooked the wires from the salinity sensor and just ran it.......

Hi.

Did you actually check and see what the salinity was? A ruptured membrane will give you a high reading all day long.

The damage won't happen to your Copper things overnight and won't if you use a good portion of dock water, I was referring to those boats that run pretty much solely on dockwater.

As for wash downs, obviously soft water doesn't spot so much, standard RO Product Water can also be made a bit softer by another lap through an RO Plant. I was on a boat where we had a second RO Plant setup to take water from the Fresh Water Tanks and run it through again, this was used as "Technical Water" and was primarily intended to use in the Turbine of the Chopper.

You mean you were referring to those boats that run solely on RO water.

Yeah we tasted it coming right out of the watermaker. There was no salt in it whatsoever. We even tested it as well. If you fired the unit up with the salinity unplugged it still read really high salt readings without being able to do so. Searecovery mentioned the circuit board was the issue and admitted they had issues with them and had a "new" design. The owner wasn't willing to spend $2400 for it.

"There was no salt in it whatsoever" You might be surprised at how much salt is in that water.

A comparison between RO water and the distillate coming from a low pressure evaporator such as supplies all the water consumed for all purposes on steamships might put the dangers of RO water in a slightly different perspective.

RO Total dissolved solids (what the meter reads): ~ 200 Evap: <20
RO Chlorides: 105 Evap: <20
RO pH: ~6 Evap pH: ~6 (about the same as saliva or eggs)
RO Hardness: 20 Evap hardness: <.02

All the water produced on a steamship is boiler feedwater quality. When the feed tanks are full the valve is switched over to the potable water tanks.

People have been drinking that ultra-pure water for a long time without damaging the ship's piping or their own. Your boat is not going to dissolve and neither are you.

And they still do. Here in Asia all you drink is bottled water. Most people drink distilled water all the time. The market leader promotes it's water by stating that it is distilled at 105 degrees Celsius so very safe to drink.
I don't drink distilled water because draining minerals on a hot day without replenishing them gives me a headache.

CaptJ,
Just had the same thing happen a couple of weeks ago. Called SeaRecovery and they said to remove (unscrew) salinity sensor white wire attached and clean it. I did and its now workinng well again. Glad it wasn't the touch screen.