Tonight, Eolian has a pronounced heel to starboard. Not that she is ever level and completely stationary, but it is enough where we are noticing it. I just came in from outside, having put the dock water hose into her port water tank. That heel is an indication that we are about to run out of water, and as everyone knows, that never happens at an opportune moment. People who live in houses don’t get to use the tilt of the floor as an indication that their water is about to be cut off. Or to use water to trim their house until the floors are level.
Eolian has two water tanks – 160 gallons on the port side, and another 160 gallons on the starboard side. She also has two equivalent diesel tanks, one on each side. At the moment, the port diesel tank is empty and the starboard one is a little more than half full. Thus we are keeping the starboard water tank empty and filling the port one. This keeps things more or less level.
This task is one that is enjoyable in the summer, often an opportunity to socialize or to just enjoy the scenery out here at the end of the dock. But tonight, in the dark with rain spitting, it is not so much fun. So I am back inside and while I am typing, I am listening to the liquid sound of water running into the tank.
Some boats on the dock choose to bypass the hassle of this ritual, and hook up a dock hose direct to their onboard water system. Having seen two boats nearly destroyed by this practice, it is one we do not follow. In both cases, some portion of the onboard water system failed. Fresh water then pours in as fast as the city of Seattle can deliver it (and they have lots… more than enough to sink a boat).
In one of the incidents, the broken water fitting was directly above the shore power inlet, thus delivering a torrent of water over the 110v wiring. That boat had a functioning bilge pump and the break was small enough that it could keep up. But the water pouring over the shore power could have easily started a fire.
In the other incident, a hose came off a fitting. In this case, the bilge pump malfunctioned, and the boat partially sank before the water was shut off, resulting in a large insurance claim, and months of disrupted living while the repairs were made.
Without a direct hookup, if we experience a water system failure, all that will happen is that the water we already have onboard will relocate a little lower in the hull.
Nevertheless, there are good reasons to have a direct hookup – for example if you have a washer and dryer onboard, or have a large family. In these cases, they just have to live with the risk, and remember to turn off the city water before leaving the boat to go to work.
OK, the sound of water trickling has stopped, and the bilge pump just ran for a couple seconds – that means that the tank is full and is overflowing into the bilge. Time to go out and put away the hose.
Bob SalnickDE45 s/v Eolian
Living aboard: Windborne in Puget Sound
http://windborneinpugetsound.blogspot.com
I read the above article on Bob’s website and asked for permission to copy it over here as it really hit home given my experience with Valkyr this past week.
We ran out of water in the two water tanks. No big deal, we would just get the hose on the dock and fill them. It worked just fine. We filled the first tank. You could tell when it was full as it started to overflow around the deck fill (this is exactly what would happen on my last boat with a water bladder instead of a solid tank. It didn’t have over flow or vent lines). We started to fill the second tank, and kept filling it and filling it… and filling it…. hmmm for some reason it just didn’t feel right. “It’s taking a lot longer to fill than the first tank” was said a couple times. Finally… “umm lets turn the hose off and find out where the water is going to.” When it comes to finding water start at the bottom and work your way up. It loves going to the lowest place it can find! “Hey guys, the bilge has a lot of water in it.” We must have had a hundred gallons or better of water in the bilge based on how long it took the bilge pump to pump it out. About 15 minutes. The slightly scary thing for us about this was that for the last few months the automatic bilge pump was not working at all. I fixed it so that it works manually now and am waiting on the new electronic bilge switches to get here so I can re-enable the automatic bilge feature. Pictures very similar to Bob’s stories about the other boats sinking floated through my head as scary what ifs. It’s not that bad because we don’t leave the shore water connected and we were there during filling the tanks to monitor it and catch that it was taking to long to fill the tank, but it is enough to make you think twice. Until I read Bobs article I was assuming that we had a leak in the tank or a broken vent or something of that sort in the tank. After we pumped out the bilge we weren’t getting any more water like that in there so it led me to believe that it wasn’t a major leak in the tank. When I get a chance I am going to go spelunking on Valkyr in and around the water tanks and get some pictures as best I can. You can see the front of the forward tank from the forward access hatch in the v-berth. There is actually almost enough space to crawl up under there if you were a bit smaller than I am. 🙂
A couple of my (I want to do) projects are gages on the tanks to tell us how much water is in them at any given time as well as a filter system for drinking and cooking water. The water coming out of the tanks now seems clean and doesn’t smell at all so that is a good thing. What we use in the kettle for hot water is leaving a slight white film behind in the kettle though. This is about on par for what I get when boiling water using city water down here though, so probably isn’t indicative of any issue with the tanks. I have a external filter from my last boat that you can screw onto the hose as you are filling the tank that I am going to take up to the boat the next time we go up there that I will use to fill the tank with. Unlike Eolian, Valkyr has two (50 gallon according to the manufactures specs) tanks that sit dead center of the vessel down in the bilge area with the tops of the tanks just centimeters from the underside of the salon floor. This gives her 100 gallons capacity. From what I can tell they are actually slightly V shaped to fit the contour of the inside of the keel/bilge area from about the forward salon near the head to the galley cabinetry. I haven’t seriously looked at the system yet.