Fresh water is one of the most important things you can have on a boat.  If you run out of water you die and you can spend a lot of effort taking barrels to shore to fill them and bring them back in the dinghy.  If you have enough fresh water you can have regular showers and your quality of life will be greatly improved!

We’re lucky in that our boat has 250 gallons of water already, which is quite a lot.  However, having chartered a few boats and dealt with having to pay for water at marinas and generally deal with the hassle, we wanted to make sure we always had enough water.  So… we bought a watermaker! Which is, essentially, a small reverse osmosis plant to convert seawater to fresh water to keep our tanks full. Ours will make 15 gallons an hour and we can run it off of our solar panels.

The box it came in was gigantic.  I’m really glad that we ended up trading the 4Runner for a big truck so we had the room to haul it back easily! Luckily there are just a lot of parts and once they’re broken down the install wasn’t too bad.   I chose to mount the main unit inside the back of the port settee.

The filter and pump assemblies ended up in one of the lower storage compartments.  There’s still enough room in there for bulk storage and that locker has a drain to the bilge.

I used the gauge assembly to fill an existing hole in the cabinet.

This is the back of the gauge and the accumulator tank.

I put the diverter valve to either test or direct to tank in the aft head under the sink.

We won’t be able to test or use it until we get to south florida where the company will send someone out for the initial setup that way we get a longer warranty. (and the water is way cleaner down there!)

Either way now we won’t have to go to shore unless we want to! 🙂