Maintaining the Water strainers - How to and what not to do

I have been saying for about 2 weeks that I need to clean the water strainer.  We used to clean them about every 4-6 weeks.  When we moved aboard, the air conditioners were running much more often than when we were not, meaning these filters were seeing a lot more circulation than ever before.  I suspect in the 5 weeks or so since we have been living on board, we likely ran as much water through the air conditioners as we had the entire previous year of just weekend use.

I had been putting it off knowing it was going to be a bit of a nasty job.  Today I decided that since I was going to do it, I would make a video of how to maintain them.  In this video I go through the steps to clean them, however waiting this long is an example of what not to do.  I can already tell that the flow is not back to what it was a month ago, which means I am going to have to flush all of the lines.  This is not going to be a simple job unfortunately.  I will likely buy a flushing kit that has a way to ensure you can put in a solution to all of the lines to break down all of that nasty growth that will be in there.

I have always had some goopy silt that gets in the water strainer in this location but this time it really felt like the texture of a jelly fish or congealed fat in the strainer bowl.

Well here is a video of how to clean it, but this stuff was pretty nasty.

Air Conditioner Condensation problem

Today I hope I have solved the problem with condensation in the forward air conditioner condensate tray.  Typically these are supposed to gravity drain and people either put them into a sump or into the bilge.  I have an issue with this on our boat.  When we bought the boat, it you can tell there was an air conditioner in this spot but it was not there.  It had all the hoses going to that location including a drain hose to the bilge.  The problem was that the drain hose ran parallel about 4 feet before it went downhill toward the bilge.  The problem is that it would not gravity drain out.
There were NO other routes to a lower space without drilling holes through a stringer and I feared doing that not knowing exactly where the 115 gallons of water tanks are and how far they extend.
I have spent countless hours trying to come up with a solution that did not involve taking up the flooring.  I looked into the Mermaid Condensator, but it doesn't appear that Mermaid sells them any more even though I found a ton of references to them on the web. I thought about making my own, but would have a similar issue with routing the suction tube to the through hull location on the discharge side of the water circulation.

In the end, I went old school low budget and I sure hope it works for me.  Basically I put an automatic bilge pump in the condensation tray, I ran a 3/4" tube from that pump to a vented loop above the water line and then tee'ed it into the galley sink drain above the water line.  The vented loop will prevent sink water from ever running or siphoning back to the condensate tray.

So now in the Galley I will have a modified bilge pump switch that will be labeled as Air Conditioner Condensation Pump

As a side note I tested this out by pumping the condensation into a bucket before I plumbed everything in.  In South Texas where it is between 85-92 this time of year.  The 16,000 BTU air conditioner for the forward salon extracts about 3/4 to 1 gallon of water an hour.  That actually shocked me, I didn't expect there to be that much.  It just goes to show I want to do something with the rear air conditioner now too in order to avoid all of that water going into the bilge.

In the event anyone is interested in the parts I used for this solution, I have put links below.

                

Water Circulation Woes...

As you may know we have been working on an engine room redesign/refit.  The start of this project was driven by the need to remove a rotted subfloor and add holding tanks.  To access all of this, essentially everything but the engine had to come out of the engine room and then start the process of rebuilding.

So the good news is we are really close and as we have been doing down this path, I have been planning how I would mount all of the pumps and strainers back in the engine room to make them easy to service.

The plan was to mount the water intake strainer for the engine and air conditioners on the side of the subfloor with easy access just sitting inside the doorway of the engine room.  I planned on using a single strainer for the air conditioner circulation pumps, so essentially water would come into the water strainer and then on the outbound side, I installed a tee fitting with one line going to the salon where the forward air conditioner water circulation pump is mounted.  The other side of the tee went to the rear air conditioner water circulation pump which was mounted in the engine room.

In the diagram below, Pump1 is mounted in the engine room and is a 1000 gallon per hour pump and runs water circulation for the owners state room air conditioner.  Pump2 is mounted in the Galley and is a 500 gallon per hour pump and runs the water circulation for the main salon Reverse cycle Air Conditioner/Heat pump

When we connected everything and ensured no leaks, we turned on the Air Conditioning in the main salon fed by pump2.  When the compressor kicked on, the pump did also and began circulating water and we had good discharge out the boat, I was feeling pretty good.  When we turned on the owner's state room air conditioner fed by pump 1, it would stop the feed of water through pump2.  I suspect this is due to being closer to the water strainer and also the fact that the pump is a higher capacity pump.  I really do not want to put another through hull in the boat so have at least come up with my next plan of action.

In the morning, I am going to remove Pump2, and just connect the lines together where the pump was.  I will then re-plumb the sea strainer to only feed to pump1, out of pump 1, I will locate a tee and feed water through both air conditioners.  The down side of this is that I need to either install a relay so that the pump kicks on when either Air Conditioner compressor runs, or I can connect Pump1 to it's own 110v breaker and just ensure that when either air conditioner is on, that breaker is on and the pump is running all of the time.

I do believe I may add valves to each output side from the pump so if I want to, I can turn off the water flow to either air conditioner if I need to service one without having to turn the other off.

I will be a little nervous wiring in the 110 volt pump to the breaker panel.  The good news is I can pull the shore power cord so I know that we will have no power coming into the boat while I am in there working on the back side of the distribution panel.  It should be a short cable run for the pump given it's proximity to the panel.  I will also need to disconnect the power to pump 2 from the inside of the Webasto Control unit in the forward salon.

Sadly, it looks like some more time in the engine room.  I don't mind it so much except after a few hours of being contorted into whatever position was required for the given job, I seem to end up with quite a few stiff muscles a few hours later.

All the while I was working on this today, Deb was sorting every single stainless steel screw, nut and bolt that I have managed to gather over the last 2 years of work.  She organized them all by size and put them in small waterproof containers.  She also sorted and organized all of the varied electronic, electric and plumbing spares and parts that we have on board.
In the last 2 weeks she has painted all of the bilges and storage behind the settees and the V-berth.  She started to organize and put the navigation station back together (we had relocated all of the items to another location when we rebuilt that).  She also cleared and organized the Galley and Tool storage.

June 2, 2013 - Update
The plumbing has been re-arranged and working as described above and outlined in the second illustration.  I opted for a seacock under the galley sink for the forward air conditioner rather than at the actual pump location.

Engine Room (Side of subfloor wall) | Left strainer for A/C and right strainer for Engine | Pump with split outputs

New additional Electric Panel and Air Conditioner

A few months ago we purchased a new combination unit for the salon that is an air conditioner, reverse cycle heater and dehumidifier.  We had been waiting until the salon was a little further along and any leaks were resolved and we were not filling the salon with saw dust before we put the expensive unit in place.

We were able to resolve the leaks that we had from the ports as well as the chain plates and the building, cutting, sanding in the salon was finally wrapping up, so we loaded the Webasto FCF 16,000 BTU unit into the dock cart and hauled it on board.

It fit well into a spot right under the settee in the salon and is accessed by removing the slide out bunk in the salon and dropping it into the storage area from above.  When adding this unit to the boats total Electric supply it was just pushing the limit of our 30amp service.  The existing panel in the boat has separate breakers for both a forward and rear air conditioner, but given that this size air conditioner runs at about 9 amps (with a startup of about 15), and the rear air conditioner (as old as it is) runs at about 12 amps with a very high startup of about 18amps.  So if both units were running and the microwave was used or a hair dryer, this would likely pop the 30amp main in the boat or at the shore power supply panel.

We decided the best approach was to add a second electric panel and 30amp service into the boat and leave the rear air conditioner on the existing original panel and the new air conditioner on the new panel.  We decided to go ahead and add plenty of room for expansion and selected the Blue Sea 8074 Electric Panel.  It comes with a volt and amp meter built in to monitor usage through the panel.


It will notify you of reverse polarity from your dock power service so you can know that information before you start turning on breakers. We love this feature since we plan on visiting marina's and you just never know the quality of the power or wiring that may be in place.

I normally like to do most of the work on the boat myself, but was nervous about doing this job for 2 reasons.  First it requires drilling a hole in the outer hull of the boat and also it required wiring in the main electric feed to this breaker box.  Because of that we hired someone do to this and he was able to complete the whole job in about 4 hours or so.

He started by drilling a hole in the outside of the boat right above the existing 30amp service line.  The boat side connector was installed and matches the other style of waterproof connectors as the other 30amp power service, telephone and cable inputs.

The wire from that service line runs through the existing wiring channels across the engine room and toward the existing electrical box where it is routed just about a foot forward of the existing one to the new panel.  The bulkhead between the engine room and walkthrough had to be cut to attach the flush mounted panel  (See photo on right).  This went just below the Xantrex remote panel for monitoring battery bank charging and battery levels when not charging.

From the panel, the one and only used breaker, runs to the new air conditioner.  So we have 7 more available breakers that can be used in the future.  After the electric was run to the new unit, I plumbed in the sea strainer, sea water circulation pump and it was also connected to the unit.  The thermostat wire was run to a forward bulkhead wall.  So the moment of truth was here and we tested out the unit.  It ran but we were not getting water circulation.  I took the lines apart and luckily it didn't take too long but the culprit was a bit of a clog in the exit through-hull.  I suspect dirt dobbers or something had tried to nest in there but after a quick clean out, all was circulating and working great.  The good news is that we now have enough air conditioning to keep the boat cool even in the heat of southern summers.  When it gets cold, we also have the heat capability and if we are going to be off the boat for some amount of time, we can set the unit to auto dehumidify as well.   Making progress, slowly but surely.

New Air Conditioner Circulation Pump

While we have been doing all this sanding and wood work on the boat, we made a conscious decision not to run the Marine Air unit so that we would not get a lot of dust into the system.  We removed the Thermostat from the wall and turned off the breaker.  Now that the wood working is complete and varnish and finish work is going on in this section, we decided to kick it back on and made working down there a little more tolerable in Texas in the Summer.  So as Boat work goes, connected the thermostat, turned on the breaker and no go, no water circulation.

After doing some checking it turns out the Rear A/C Circulation Pump was not starting up.  I think that I have a bad spot on the motor, since I was able to disassemble the unit, rotate the motor a bit and it would start right up.  I decided to replace it with a new one and we can get the other one rebuilt and keep it as a backup.  I replaced it with a March Pump and she is pumping water really good.  Likely went a bit overkill with 1000 gallons per hour but I figured by getting one this large, I could use this single pump to pump water through both air conditioner units in a pinch.