Water makers are a requirement for “high living” on a full time live aboard pleasure yacht. We’ve plenty of friends who have very efficient rainwater catchment systems and virtually all those guys also have a water maker. Some of them only use rainwater to fill jerry cans for showers and clothes washing, some run the water through 20 and maybe even 5 micron filters and into their drinking water tank, and some don’t even filter the water. Rainwater should be clean enough to drink, but what it touches on the way from the sky to the water tank might ruin your day. Bird crap, dead and rotting flying fish or squid, even crusted salt can spoil the water and contaminate the tank, leading to pumping it all overboard, then filling the tank with fresh water and shocking it with chlorine bleach, then pumping all that overboard and filling again with clean water. Folks who let the water get to their drinking water tanks have to pay close attention to how sanitary the surfaces, including canvas catchments or properly designed cabin tops are. On the drinking water tap side, running the water through both a fine filter system, a charcoal filter system, and perhaps even a UV light system might be the most prudent way to protect one’s health. If you want to cruise remote locales, keep in mind that medical help, especially something like a hospital with X-ray equipment or a full up trauma center could be several days or even weeks away. French Polyneisa covers an enormous geographical are with about a zillion inhabited islands / atolls, yet the capital city of Papeete doesn’t offer competent or complex treatment for strokes or cancer – medical evacuation to France or some other country is necessary.
So safe, clean potable water is key to good health, and in a tropical environment consumption goes up just to stay hydrated. Some areas have very little rain so either making your own water or sourcing water from onshore resources is the only option. Onshore resources may or may not be available, as in remote atolls those generally consist of cisterns that caught the last rainwater available, and the first priority for that is the survival of the locals, so one may or may not be able to obtain some of their supply. Also consider how you’d rather spend your time – humping water in jerry cans from an onshore resource to the dinghy and out to the boat for hours on end every few days? Do you like to shower? Do you want your spouse to be happy and smelling good? Do you want to be able to rinse the salt off the stainless and those expensive winches occasionally, or maybe rinse the salt out of the cockpit sometimes? You’re going to need fresh water.
Water makers are expensive and eat energy. The cheapest ones are generally the least energy efficient, but have a very high production rate. Our CruiseRO 30 gallon per hour unit cost about half of what we would have spent on a Spectra unit in 2014. It also uses about 3 times as much energy for the equivalent volume of water produced and it’s freakin’ noisy. That said, it has been insanely reliable, because it’s a very simple machine with no fancy engineering, no proprietary parts, and excellent engineering. You can build something very similar for even less money if you want that project.
Spectra’s patents seem to have expired so there are competitors in the high efficiency water maker space, all building their own version of an energy recovery pump. Reliability seems to be an issue with some manufacturer’s products. The energy recovery pumps are a bit of an engineering marvel. Where all the manufacturers seem to cut corners is with the feed pump, a common failure mode which has plagued several of our friends whether they’re equipped with Spectra, Schenker or Osmosea. Buyer beware and expect to do a bit more engineering to “enhance” the system with a better feed pump. Also make sure the support network is worldwide, and carry spares.
We’re water pigs, we shower daily, and we like it.
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