Watermaker

When we bought Blue Pearl she had all the parts for a watermaker , it had been put together once and it was tested once after which is was decommissioned. This summer I will probably make a start putting it all together , finding places to put the parts permanently and start it up.

After looking at the components, reading up on watermakers  and with some advice from Rich from www.cruiserowaterandpower.com I believe we will have a watermaker that produces some 12 to 13 gallons of water per hour. This kinda disappointed me but the high pressure pump  we have only delivers 1 gallon per minute of salt water to the membrane. I will check this once we’re on Blue Pearl again and get it up and running for testing and then decide if maybe we need a bigger high pressure pump to produce more water but that depends also on the motor , bigger pump = bigger motor and I dont know what motor we have ! .. but I am getting ahead of myself here

The parts we have are :

• Dow filmtech SW30-2521 membrane + high pressure vessel
• Hydra-cell G22 high pressure pump
• 240 volt motor (type / power unknown at this point
• Koolair PM 500 feed pump (basically a march equiv pump)
• High pressure needle valve
• various hoses (low and high pressure)
• product flow gauge

and it looks like this now , mostly just a bunch of parts 🙂

What I have also done is design (copy) a control panel , to which I am going to fit the various controls and gauges so I can operate and control the watermaker without having to open locker where it is located now . the panel looks like this

and parts I ordered for the control panel are

• panel mount High pressure needle valve     26 euro
• 2x pressure gauges     30 euro ea,
• flow meter   12 euro 
• USplastic 3 way ball valve 18 euro
• 2x 220volt 16A switches for pumps 3 euro ea.
• TDS meter   22 euro 
• panel https://www.frontpanelexpress.com/      200 euro 
• HP pressure lines and various connectors (no price yet)

and also a 10″ filter set (28 euro) to clean the seawater to the high pressure pump

I know some of these parts are already on board but what I plan to do is put the panel together while at home, connect everything so that when we arrive back its easily connected.

All in all it took me about 10 hours total to design the panel with online software from schaeffer   sourcing all the components etc. I know I could have ordered just a panel with all components from RO watermakers but this way I understand the system a lot better

This is what the panel looks like with all the parts mounted , not bad if I may say so !, Brushed aluminium 3mm thick

Once I start putting it all together on board I will post a few more pics and maybe a video