We have been away from Florida for months now and find lots of different kinds of water. There's the
open ocean outside the barrier reef. There's the water inside the
barrier reef. There's harbor water. There's the kind of water you
find in between the mangrove roots. And lately, river water. But
you can't drink any of it.
The Dry Tortugas from sea, where there is no water except what they collect from the rain.
To drink it, we have to run it through
our desalinator. It uses reverse osmosis, ie lots of pressure, to
force water molecules through a porous membrane that stops salt ions.
Really really tiny pores. And lots of pressure. And lots of
electricity to make that pressure (the salt water is free). We use
about 35 watt-hrs to make a gallon of fresh water. Which is pretty
good efficiency as such machines go.
The average USA household uses 70
gallons of water per person per day. If we used water at that rate,
we would need ten times our solar panel array, which already covers
our whole bimini top. Or two hours of generator time per day extra
to what we do now (about two hours a week!). So we use a lot less
water. In fact we use about 5 gallons per person per day to drink,
wash, clean, and do laundry.
Can you cut your (indoor) water use by
35x fold?
Here's how we do it:
Use seawater to flush the toilets (that's about 25% of the typical
houshold water use)
Go naked so we don't have any laundry. Just kidding, mostly. We do
generate laundry but a lot less than normal and we save up the bulky stuff like bedding for when we are in port with local laundromats.
Shower not more than once a day and use shower heads that a) restrict
flow to a fine spray, b) have cut-off valve to stop the water flow
when you aren't actually using it on yourself.
Washing dishes with extreme care. This means – turn OFF the water
except when it's running on something that needs it – don't run the
water until it's hot, just use what you have, it's the tropics and
the water is already basically warm - don't fill huge tubs with a
gallon of soapy water just then dump that out; instead, get the
sponge wet and add soap to it and then scrub a batch of items and
then rinse those items – rinse twice using the second rinse on one
item to be the first rinse on the next item, and using your hand to
sluice the water around on the item not just more water flow - use
seawater for washing large items then rinse with fresh – use the
minimum soap possible since more soap means more rinsing. Since
Jennifer is unable to go to these procedural extremes it seems that I
do the dishes a lot.
Let the rain wash the outside of the boat to get the salty crusty
stuff off.
What we don't skimp on is drinking it.
Turns out that drinking water is the least of our water usage, dish
washing is the most.
And the first thing we do when on an
overnight ashore is fill up a bath tub with hot water and soak!
