Cleaning the Water Tanks

Aboard JonNe', we are blessed with two 75 gallon st/stl water tanks.  When we purchased the boat in 2005, we installed a new water filtration system for the fresh water consumption aboard.  I had never really thought about the idea before, and Renne' and I had both chosen NOT to drink the water aboard either her Irwin 37 or my CT-41.  If we were moving aboard, however, we felt it was necessary to  have palatable water that we could drink, cook, and bathe with.  So we set out to find a good system.

After searching for a while, our next door neighbors, Al and Sue McDonald, owners the Mountain Valley Spring Water distributorship in Houston, Tx, set us on a research project that included reading up on water safety and health issues in potable (drinkable) water offered from various municipalities.  Al was out working on his water filtration system installed in their townhouse, and he had filled several white, 3-gallon buckets of water:  one was from the tap, one was from the filtered water after I believe three months or so, and one from a freshly changed filter system.  I was astonished when I noticed the differences.  The one from the tap was quite yellow, the freshly changed filtered water was beautifully clear, and the one after a three month period looked as though it needed to be changed, but was no where near the tap water. 

After looking at our budget, we purchase the same system, modified to fit in our boat, was installed under a cabinet in the after stateroom.

This is a bank of three 4" x 10" filters.  A 5 micron Spun Poly/Melt Blown Sediment Filter;

a MatriKX CTO+ Charcoal filter for filtering out chlorine and a bunch of other chemicals, taste and odor;

and a Centaur Carbon Cartridge which contains catalytically charged carbon designed for chloramine and chemical reduction.  This cartridge is for communities which use chloramine rather than chlorine for chemical cleansing of their municipal water systems.

So all of our water is filtered extremely well prior to it getting to us.  I have noticed that the sediment filter has been discolored and had to change the filter every three months or so.  The discoloration was from surface corrosion in the st/stl water tanks and the fact the tanks were installed in Taiwan in 1985, and probably never cleaned.  So this week, I decided to open the water tanks to find out what the issue was.

This is what I found:

I know, I know, it doesn't look real good.  But it is just surface corrosion, and now I know what the issue is.  I didn't really realize how large two 75 gallon tanks are until I realized that on either side of this are two baffles that open up (you can see the jagged holes exposed that the camera is looking through:

 

Those had to be cleaned too.  I went to the Dollar Store and bought a cheapo ($1.00) mop and cut off the handle.  I then proceeded to scrub all of the corrosion off.  Fortunately, it came off with no difficulty. When I finished, the tanks actually looked really good!

 

These aren't the finished, but you get the idea.  For some reason, I didn't bother to get the finished look.  Oh well!  The good news is, although the corrosion was removed by the filters originally, the sediment filter should now last a bit longer than 3 months.

 

I changed the sediment filter when I finished this job.  Now, realize this has got to be 10 times worse than usual, but this is all of the corrosion material that actually came through the tanks while I was cleaning:

 

New One

 

Old One!!

 

So we now have even BETTER water!

 

So we will be out on the sand bar this evening!  Come join us for sundowners - just a photo to give you an idea of where we will be. 

 

 

Ya'll come back now, ya hear!

 

JonNe'