hi welcome to sailing vessel seeker and the boat the internet built
right here in tulsa oklahoma from scratch and today
we're starting on our water maker when seeker is completed she'll be an
expedition boat a research vessel free of charge for
anybody that wants to come along and do research on the ocean and i suspect
we'll need a lot of fresh water during that time now we have a rainwater
collection system that we've already put into the boat
so if it rains we can collect fresh water that way and we also thought about
at one point using a distiller which is taking uh
heat from your engine solar panels that sort of thing and
boiling salt water and then condensing the fresh water back out of the steam
leaving the salt behind but then we dropped the
batteries that we're going to use the distilled water so we didn't have the
necessity for a lot of distilled water but that's still a great way to go
however the technology has changed greatly on reverse osmosis over the last
10 years so i've been out shopping and right
there on that table that is everything we need about four thousand five hundred
dollars worth of equipment and it will be able to make 80 gallons
of fresh water every hour now it's going to be using a
lot of power because there's a big pump involved too
but it's a wonderful way of getting a lot of fresh water
and we're going to build a lot of redundancy into it so if one part of the
system fails we can still make fresh water and if all
else fails we'll rely on the rain this is the magic inside this is a
spiral wound membrane made by dow and it is
a work of art inside here there's a very very thin layer that actually
filters out the salt from water actually it just
lets water pass through everything else gets filtered out so
no bacteria viruses larger molecules and water and waters
unfortunately on earth is a very small molecule a tiny little thing what they
succeeded in doing was making tiny little holes in a membrane that's
oh it's it's it's a hair is huge compared
to the thickness of the part of this that does the work
and that is where the little water molecule squeezes through
leaving the salt and the chlorides and the iron and all the other stuff behind
so what you get through this is beautiful fresh water
now it actually has some stuff that gets through
and we actually need that you don't want water that's just water because
our bodies need minerals and a little bit of salt and other things as well
so we measure that on the outcoming end by just tasting it our bodies know what
we like and you can also use a little eight
dollar electronic gadget it tells you the total dissolved solids
inside your water and a little bit of that it's a good
thing now you really all look the videos in the description i'll put some links
in there they show you how these are made and how
they work and it's fantastic stuff what you really need to know is this is
a cross flow membrane in other words the salt water
flows over the surface of it and most of the salt water goes on out
the end only some of the water the fresh water passes through the
membrane and ends up in the middle of this so
let's take a look at the housing this is a housing it's just a fiberglass tube
that you buy and you put end caps on the membrane
goes inside here what tells you how it works is the end
caps to it so you look at this you'll see one end
cap salt water flowing in the other end salt
water flowing out and fresh water flowing out so there you go
so what we're gonna do is we're gonna have four membranes
a lot of these things have two you know the more membranes the more water you
get that's how we make it up to 80 gallons of water per hour
and so what happens is salt water flows in it divides it
some fresh water comes out and the rest of the saltwater goes on to the next
membrane and then out of that one into the next
they're all hooked up in series so the first membrane gives you the most
fresh water because there's more fresh water in that
batch of salt by the time it gets to the end there's not so much fresh water
coming out anymore but we're still putting it through
another membrane because we've used all that energy out of that motor to
build up this pressure we might as well milk as much fresh water out of it as
possible before we dump the brine or the
discharge back into the ocean okay i may not put them in series more
to come on that later now a popular way to get into reverse
osmosis water makers is just go out and buy the whole thing already built
they're going to cost you somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 to 12
15 sometimes 20 thousand dollars depending on how much
water you're going to make another way and one that of course
if you're watching our channel you probably prefer is the diy approach and
the best way to do that is to buy a kit or go out and buy your own now
you're going to spend more money if you buy a kit
but it comes along with somebody that's going to answer the phone
and give you all the help you need if you're like me and you don't probably
going to make that call and if you needed to then just buy the
parts yourself you'll save about two thousand dollars on a setup
like this so with that let's go around the table and look at the major
components you know the first thing you're going to need is some way to get
salt water on board your boat a through hole like that now seeker has
a seat chest so i won't be using this but i have a c chest with a big two inch
ball valve on it that's going to supply the water in
we'll put one of these on for discharging the brine or the salt water
back overboard and so after the sea chest it'll go to
in our case a wash down pump this is a johnson wash down pump it has
a cut in and cut out switch on it that's based on pressure
others pumps can be used too just something to supply
enough pressure that you can push the water through filtration membranes
because you got to filter the water down before it goes into the high
pressure pump because this thing's expensive and you don't want to destroy
it so what we do is we have a 20 micron
and then it'll go into a flipster that's a 5 micron
and then we'll put a pressure gauge in so that we can see that
that pump is being able to push enough water through these filters to bring the
pressure up to here because we never want to let this pump
run dry this monster is about twelve hundred dollars and that is a very good
price on one it's all 316 stainless steel and basically every
component in the system is either plastic
or 316 stainless steel with a couple of exceptions
because i've made some modifications i mean why build it yourself if you're not
gonna customize it right okay we gotta clear something up about
this ro reverse osmosis because if you're like me you go out
there you google ro membrane and you get really excited because you
find one that's like 70 gallons a day and only uses 45 psi and they're like
wow this is great what you found is a household ro
membrane not a seawater ro membrane and the confusing thing is
they're both made by dow or dupont and they both have femtech printed right
on them that's the brand name from but there's 20 different filters they
make okay so you're not going to have the same
membrane now and even worse than that the sw30 which is their saltwater
membrane sometimes gets used on household systems because
it flows fresh water through it really well and it still does its cleaning job
so you'll see them over there but you'll never see a household or what
they call a low energy filter something uses low psi in use in a
marine environment and here's why when you open your tap water up you get
water that to me is fantastic i mean i'm happy with
it because anywhere in the world is going to be better than the garden hoses
and rivers that i've drunk out of in springs you know for
much of my life so i'm happy with any tap water
but this huge industry is built up because you get 500 parts per million
of something in your water coming through that tap
sometimes it's a lot higher than that you know 1500
i'm still happy with that 2000 yeah i would make it taste a little funky but
you know i grew up on the bottom end of the real grandy river so it's all
meaningless to me but this industry has grown up around
people who want three and four parts per million in
their tap water and it's like to me it's like yeah okay fine
whatever but you know once you get down below 500 you're doing good and the
saltwater membranes will get you they'll leave you about 350 parts per million in
the water so you're going to be you're going to be fine in my my book if
you want cleaner water than that try carnival cruise line don't come on
my boat the uh next thing too is you'll see is you'll
see aquarium people because they use it they are insane about it because they
want nothing in their water you know you know
like two parts per million of you know calcium it'll be okay but
they really like clean water they have to to keep the fish
the corals alive so when you get to those guys it's it's insane what they
even run through demineralization
deionization processes to sparkle it up even more the
other people that you'll see this stuff with
is the home brew and the wine gut making guys they know how to clean up water too
but all these people are starting with 500 parts per million
in the ocean the ocean runs somewhere averages
around 33 000 parts per million so there's a lot more uh calcium and
other things in the water in the ocean so
you're going to have to do a lot more cleaning and you're going to have to use
high pressure and it's a completely different membrane
even though it's still film tech but the good news is because of this
huge uh ro marketplace
the pre-filters and the the the five micron on the 20 micron cartridges
all this stuff is really inexpensive and you buy it from those type shops either
the aquarium shops or the home rr people even the aquarium
people have some really good pumps now this is a
this is a lowland johnson washdown pump but the aquarium people if you want to
put a really nice pump on there they will have the pumps and we've
listed them on our website too so you can pay 400 for a pump that's
made for salt water and it's a fantastic quality with
magnetic drive wonderful pump so just because you see us using this mean
doesn't mean there's not a better option out there i needed a wash down pump that
thing automatically turns on and shuts off so
it's going to work two jobs for me these things
a lot of the fittings the the rejection the product lines that we are going to
use all of that stuff came from uh websites
selling home ro systems fantastic stuff but when somebody says oh my home ro
system does yeah just smile and say that's nice
that's nice now up to here the plumbing is pretty
much just pvc and hose and i never buy just a couple feet hose
i bought the whole thing because i figured i'll use it somewhere else or on
somebody else's boat eventually and this is three quarter inch we'll
probably use some half inch hose too this is just spiral reinforced
uh pvc flexible hose and that'll feed in right to here to the low side of the
pump nice l and it will come off the high
pressure side either of them we can choose up here i'm
actually going to use both again for my customization and then
we're going to run to a high pressure line
this is a stainless steel braided hose and it's ptfe smooth bore hose inside
that we're going to crimp down with 316 stainless steel jic hydraulic
fittings those will get tacked into the ends of
our housings through jic fittings there
and there they are like this one and this is the way i like going because i'm
going to use a lot of jic and hydraulic fittings on the boat
and i have a machine for crimping the ends onto the hose you can
actually have these made for you which is what most people would do
you can actually buy them pre-made in a lot of cases
but you're going to have to have something to handle high pressure a lot
of people will go with swedge lock or something like that
which is the tubing fitting that goes between these housings
and that's a good way to go it's just really expensive and it's not something
that i want to carry around on the boat so for me this is my choice but we'll
put other options and all those options will be on our web page so in the
description you'll find a link to the sp seeker website
and everything that we have about water makers and if it's something that you've
just found that you think is a great way to
go send it to me and we'll add it to the web page okay
so that can be a kind of like a clearinghouse for all this stuff
and my housings were made from composite concepts
they sell the housings as well and they have the best price that i found
available and i like their design because they're
using aluminum on the outside but this is an acetal or a delrin
plastic as it may be called delrin is the the
brand name acetal is what it really is this stuff doesn't corrode and it's
going to get some o-rings and it's going to
keep that membrane housed inside there we're going to put those together first
now all the way through the membranes the salt water is kept at high pressure
like 800 psi and the way that's done is there's a
valve that chokes it down at the end to increase the
pressure this is a needle valve and we'll talk a little bit more about it
but you got to buy a special needle valve
you can't just go out in your shop and say oh i've got a needle valve
you've got to be able to unload all the pressure or all of the gallons
of water that that pump will make if you don't do that you're going to keep
pressure in it and that's going to make that pump hard
to start under load so if you're on the borderline of
enough power to run that pump like i am you're going to want a valve that opens
up and dumps everything that pump can move 4.2
gallons of water per minute this valve will
allow 4.2 gallons per water per minute through it
so that pump can start with almost no load the next thing
you're going to want in there of course is a pressure gauge so you can see that
you're maintaining the pressure at and not above
800 which is the limit for these membranes now past that valve the high
pressure salt water goes back to low pressure so
you can just dump it overboard through a through hole and the other part of it
is just fresh water and it's not a lot of
fresh water we're talking about 80 gallons per hour
so you know a gallon something per minute so you can use this cheap
plastic push tube stuff to take care of the fresh water coming out and in my
case i'm going to want to be able to sample the water off each of these so i
can make sure that all of them are working well and if one
of them starts producing salt water i can
find out which one it is and then i can reroute my hydraulic hoses around it to
avoid that membrane and go back to producing what
fresh water i can that's part of our redundancy another
part of our redundancy is we're going to add another pump
but it's going to be one of those cheap electric pressure washers you can get
from harbor freight or home depot we just
need something in case that pump bites it and we can't repair
it you know the cheap off the shelf uh pressure
washers don't work but only for a while because they're not
stainless steel and they're not very big pumps anyway so they're not going to
produce the amount of flow through these and i
need a 4.2 gallon per minute supply because i
have four membranes do the easy math you need about a gallon
per minute of flow across the cross flow membrane
in order to produce a reasonable amount of fresh water
so you can't put four membranes in a real small pump and expect it to work
great what i'll do if i have to fall back to a
smaller pump for a temporary workaround is i'll probably take out two
of the membranes so i only have you know whatever it is flowing across
two membranes maybe even one but a system that i built and i make
very flexible is something that i can be assured of
that when we're you know 300 miles west of midway island and this
thing has a problem we can probably fix it so these keys and
valves will let us sample the water coming off each membrane
and allow us to divert it into our tank when we know it's good
and also on the production water line there's a flow meter this thing shows
how much water is actually being produced that
can go to your tank and it's important too because you can produce
water from near freshwater sources or brackish water or rivers or lakes you
know we will sail through some lakes here in oklahoma first and be on the
river for at least a month or so so we'll make our
water from fresh water i mean we're not going to
drink the lake water you ought to see this stuff
you know the arkansas river up in colorado that's one thing you can make
beer out of that down here and you gotta have one of
these because if you're gonna make fresh water off of lake water or
you know something that's closer to fresh water not salt you're gonna be
able to push a lot more water fresh water through
these membranes than you would if it was salt water so you're going to have to
have one of these because you cannot exceed that 80 gallons per hour for four
membranes and as you exceed the production rate of the
membrane you can damage it and we'll talk about other ways you can
damage these membranes like chlorine most city water supplies they chlorinate
their water to keep it you know from growing stuff
if you run chlorinated water through these membranes you'll damage the
membrane so you either got to make water to flush
them with in other words after you're done using them you flush
fresh water through them you can't use fresh water that has chlorine in it so
if you take it out of your tanks just to flush it through
and you chlorinated your tanks you got to have a carbon block filter
to filter that chlorine out we'll talk more about that in other ways you can
damage your membranes yeah you know 200 a piece you
don't want to damage them and if you take care of your membranes
you can get upwards to 10 years out of them i mean when you're finished using
them for a season you pickle them a lot of membranes that are in use out
there in the world they don't get used that much
so 10 years is possible on a boat like ours
we expect to be using them routinely and in
conditions where the water is not so great then
we can expect maybe two years out of them and i'm not going to put a fancy
control box in but we'll talk about them it works for some people i like having a
nice analog hands-on here's the valve turn this type
arrangement i don't like having all the extra bits and pieces because then if it
fails it's just more complications to fix i like being more intimate with my
equipment wow did i just say that strike that so i'm just going to have
some you know home depot off the shelf uh electrical parts and
boxes to power this thing up and who knows we want to get fancy with
it maybe we'll do that later on so the first thing we're going to do is
we're going to take our housings and put them together with the membranes inside
now the membranes cannot be allowed to dry out like the humidity here would
ever let that happen but anyway they have a biocide there's a little bit
of moisture in the bag there if you can see that
and they got to stay damp if you let them dry out
that 0.2 micron layer in there will be destroyed or cracked
and it will start leaking more salt water through so you don't want to let
that happen so once they're in the housings with the
end caps on we'll plug the end of them and they'll be fine until
we actually start using them that does it for the overview the next video is on
assembling the housings and the membranes enjoy
you