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From: Rosalie B. (no email)
Date: Thu Aug 17 2006 - 17:21:32 EDT
On Thu, 17 Aug 2006 15:26:12 -0400, you wrote:
We have friends (Don and Gwen) who are currently in the South Pacific
(in Tonga). In May 2001, Don wrote
>The Spectra 12-volt, 200C-WONDERFUL, PERFECT --- Can't say enough good things about it. Does what the dealer says it will do, AND it does it quietly and nearly maintenance free. We have had a couple of leaks that required some attention, but otherwise I just change the filters whenever the flow of good product slows down below 8 gph, and I keep it freshwater-flushed weekly when in a port that we can not make water. (We have isolated our forward reserve tanks - about 30+ gallons - to keep a supply of our own water available for back-flushing as it's important to keep chlorine away from the membrane.) As of May '01, we'd run it for 679 hours since installation in May '99. That's 679 x 8 gal/hr = 5432 gallons we didn't have to buy or carry! I use two sets of filters, both 5 and 20 micron, and I just wash them out, sun dry them, and rotate them as necessary.
In February 2003, Gwen (who writes most of their web page narratives,
and who now has a column in Latitudes and Attitudes) wrote.
>. Don had a chance to go to San Francisco to attend a watermaker school put on by Spectra, the manufacturer of our watermaker, which he very much wanted to do
>July 2003 will, in my mind, forever be Spectra watermaker month. On the first of July, as we motored south to Juncalito to position ourselves for the upcoming fireworks show, we got the radio call we had been waiting a month for. Some kind soul had picked up the package containing our new watermaker membrane from Downwind Marine in San Diego and brought it to Puerto Escondido.
>
>Our beloved Spectra watermaker has, for four hardworking years, provided us with over 11,000 gallons of great fresh water, extracted by the miracle of reverse osmosis from the seas we sail through. In March Don attended Spectra’s Tech School in San Francisco so that he would feel confident that he could keep our system operating anywhere in the world. Ironically, when we “unpickled” the watermaker in May after our long marina stay in Mazatlán, we discovered that the membrane had gone into shock. Despite Don’s schooling and despite a flurry of emails back and forth to Spectra, nothing we tried could get our water quality back down to where it should be. This was not a terrible shock, because we had figured we were approaching the reasonable life expectancy of the membrane anyway and had planned to put in a new one in the fall, especially if we continued on schedule to depart for the South Pacific. We had to get one a few months sooner than planned.
>We continued to make water for general use in one 45-gallon tank, whilst in the other two we conserved quality drinking water. This, of course, is how many people cruise, so it was less a matter of hardship than one of attention, and it was a valuable reality check. We were pleased to find we hadn’t lost the ability to conserve when we had to. However, we were pretty happy to get the new membrane installed.
>
>About the same time, another of our cruising cronies from last summer – Jerry of Mirador – hooked back up with our group, and he was having some trouble with his watermaker. Before he knew it, Don was making his first service call. Then, a week or so later, we were called to divert to meet up with another friend from last summer who also had problems to diagnose. These three “jobs” (no charge) took up a lot of Don’s time and attention and cut severely into his hunting, reading and napping time. On the other hand, he probably couldn’t have arranged a better scenario for cutting his teeth as a roving tech rep.
grandma Rosalie
S/V RosalieAnn, Leonardtown, MD
CSY 44 WO #156
http://home.mindspring.com/~gmbeasley/id1.html
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