Watermaker Woes Part 2

Link to Part 1

The watermaker issue wasn’t getting any better on its own so by the time we got back to Savusavu we knew action would need to be taken. We couldn’t head north through the remote islands of Tuvalu and Kiribati with a watermaker that can’t produce safe drinking water. Before biting the bullet and ordering a new membrane, we tried running a cleaning solution through the one we had. Our friends on TBV had the solution we needed and luckily, they let us buy it from them. Tim went to every place that might even have a small chance of having it, but no luck. So, we took Exodus out in the bay to do the procedure. We carefully followed all the instructions, and the only tricky part was that the water needed to be within a specific temperature range to be effective, but we sorted out a way to do that, and we kept our hopes up that this would solve our problem. Yeah, no. It made absolutely no difference in our salinity readings, so we went ahead and ordered the new membrane. Tim had quite the time sorting out the shipping instructions with the company he ordered from. We used DHL, because we had been told that is the only reliable way to get something shipped to Fiji, and the Waitui Marina is the DHL hub.

It took about another week to arrive, and sure enough, that was the problem. The new membrane produced much, much lower salinity readings. So, our conclusion is we must have destroyed our membrane by filling our water tank with dock water in New Zealand. Since the water maker uses tank water to flush itself after it’s been run or at 5-day intervals if it isn’t run, it’s important for the tank water to be chlorine free. Chlorine in the water can damage the membrane, and even though we thought we properly filtered the dock water, perhaps not.

In any case we were quite relieved to be leaving Fiji with a functioning watermaker and we just couldn’t get enough of looking at those low salinity readings.