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

Plumbing Project Continued (Joining it all together)

In the last post we talked about the new plumbing project that we were undertaking but could only take that project so far until the engine room was ready to connect it all together.

Part of the work that was going on in the engine room (and in a different post detailing that project) was to install holding tanks for waste water.  To do this, the old floors and platforms that had some rot in them had to be replaced.  A new floor was built, frame for the tanks, tanks installed and a new subfloor on top of those was created providing a new platform to mount the batteries, pumps hot water, heater, etc.

Early on during this project we wanted to make sure we had a way to filter water for use in our boat.  We have seen other boats that would put a canister style filter in the galley on the main sink cold water supply to ensure drinking and cooking water is filtered.

We decided to to create a 2 stage filter that will filter all water whether it has come in from a dockside pressure line or water from either of our two water holding tanks on board.  (We store 115 gallons of potable water on board in 2 tanks)  Because there may be times that we take rain water into the tanks, we wanted to be sure that we can filter it completely.    The first stage filter is a 5 micron sediment filter and the second stage is a 2 micron carbon block filter.  This not only filters the water from impurities, but the carbon block will remove any bleach that we may add to the tanks to purify any suspect water we may take in.



With the engine room complete enough to get back in there, we have been able to put the fresh water pressure pump in, the hot water heater, and start to combine all of the water lines that are replacing all of the old PVC flexible hosing that was starting to break down.

The picture on the right shows a small shelf I installed to mount the new fresh water pump to.  This pump is a variable speed pump that eliminates the need for an accumulator tank.  Above the shelf there is a wooden plate mounted over the soundproofing material (1-1.5" thick soundproofing covers all walls in the engine room)  This wooden panel will be the place to mount the manifolds to distribute the lines to the different portions of the boat.

I was able to find these extendable diffuser connections.  Basically it looks like a tee with PEX connectors on 2 sides and the 3rd side fits into one of the other tees.  The more you push together the more connection points there are, and it would be real easy to add an additional port for a future expansion.

One of the things we liked about PEX was that all lines can be color coded making the designation between hot and cold obvious.  In the picture on the left, I had connected cold water supplies to both the Galley/Front Head and also the Rear Head.  On the left side the hot water connections are made to also go to the Galley/Front Head and also the Rear Head.

I started with these lines mainly because when we ran the pex, I had left quite a bit of extra in the engine room and it was rather cluttered with every one of those lines having an additional 4-5 feet of line in the way.  I knew I bought more than I needed so I was ok wasting a bit to make sure we had plenty in there until we knew exactly where we were mounting it all.

You can see a bit of the finished connection points in the photo to the right.

Before this project there were flexible hoses and hose clamps and tees all over the place and it looked like a real mess.  I am glad to see this organized like it is in the picture on the right. Now with that said, I can tell you that as I have been planning and imaging this project, I had envisioned all of these really straight lines all mounted flush right up along each bulkhead and corner.  That would have been great, but as it was I think we spent about $250 on tees and 90 degree connections.  If we had done this the way I envisioned we could have easily tripled that, so I am satisfied with this and it looks MUCH better than before.

I also started to remove the connections from the old hot water heater and noticed that it had a horrible oder in the water inside the tank.  It smelled like sulfur and we had noticed this prior to starting this project as well.  In the end, we decided that if we were going to look at replacing the hot water heater now was the time.  We considered an on-demand style but after doing the calculations quickly realized that even the smallest load required would be 20amps at 120 volts.  This would translate to no less than 2400 amp hours and more than I would be able to supply with the current inverter and I like the idea of being able to make hot water in a bind by running the engine for 10 minutes or so.  We have mounted the hot water heater and ran the cold and hot water lines to this location.  This model does come with the ability to circulate the engine coolant water through the hot water heater to generate hot water without electricity, but sadly the hot water lines from the engine won't reach this new location for the hot water heater so will need to be replaced with longer ones.

New Plumbing Lines installed

It appears back in 1978 when the boat was built, some of the water lines that were run were 1/4 copper tubing. At some point in the past one of the previous owners replaced that copper plumbing with reinforced hose. The down side is that there had been many places where it was run in small runs and then joined together or sections replaced and joined to the old.

 The results were a spaghetti twined mess in most cases with plastic Tee's and hose clamps. In the engine room there were 3 or 4 Tee's as things were added over the years and it just appeared to be a bit unmanageable. While cleaning in the engine room we decided to scrub the hoses and as we did noticed they were "gummy" When doing some research what I found out is that the "gummy" feeling was the material starting to break down.

Under Galley

This was the birth of a new project. Run new water lines for all fresh/pressure water throughout the boat, clean up and organize the plumbing runs and add water filtration to not only filter what is stored in the tanks but also the standard city water input when at a Marina. We started by running new hot and cold water lines from the engine room to the galley. We welcomed this change because someone in the past ran the 2 Flexible hoses for water along the floor in the galley (Rather than under a floor or through a compartment).

 From the Galley, we ran the new lines forward under the sole to the forward port hanging locker. From there we chose a new route over the previous one by going from section to section up to the V-Berth, across the v-berth and back down the starboard side into the forward head under the sink. We also ran hot and cold lines from the engine room to the rear head as well. In the rear head we added tee's and cutoffs so we could feed hot and cold water to the sink as well as the shower. We also added a fresh cold water line extension to provide water to the rear head rather than pumping in from a through hull.

We chose to instal Pex lines rather than the flexible hosing that was in the boat before.  After doing some research and finding out that many new boats are being made with Pex, we decided to give it a try.  In every place where the lines go through a bulked we installed a PVC protective sleeve to protect the Pex from any wearing with movement.   We also supported all Pex with clips (as seen in the picture above as well).  Pex lines are now run to the Galley and both heads. We still have to bring it all together in the engine room and connect it to the hot water heater and filters.    Like most projects, we created a map of what we intended to install so that we can keep it for reference and with the boat documentation.  Below is the diagram of the fresh water plumbing.