Water Conservation

This post is about water, specifically, about how potable water is a very valuable and limited resource when living on a boat.  It seems counter-intuitive that water is a limited resource while living surrounded by water, but it is true.  Our boat carries two tanks of water. One holds 240 liters, the other holds 300 liters of water ( about 142.6 gallons).  Since we very rarely stay at marinas, most of the time we fill our water tanks with a hose when we stop to get diesel. We don't have to get diesel very often, so we try to make our water last 3-4 weeks.  In the USA and all the developed countries, water is readily available, generally safe, and free at fuel stations.  We have a "water key" that accesses the tanks through the deck.  With a hose, we can generally fill our tanks in 20-30 minutes.  Sometimes, due to not enough depth at the docks for our boat,  we have had to dinghy ashore and fill jerry cans with water.  This method can take us 2-3 hours to fill our tanks.  In the USA and Europe, we generally trust the water sources to be safe, but when we aren't sure, or if the taste of the water isn't to our liking, we use a variety of filters on the hose.  We use a particle filter when we are unsure if the water has anything that can cause us to get sick, a charcoal to take out impurities and make the water taste better, and we also use a chlorine filter as an added layer of protection.  Our kitchen faucet has yet another particle filter.  We also carry a few extra gallons of bottled water just incase our tanks started leaking. 

This all means we have to stay pretty conscious of how much water we have and how much we are using. 

Showers. When we are in a safe place to swim, we can "shower" every day on our swim platform, only using water from our tank to quickly rinse off.  Otherwise, we only shower about 2 times a week, even when it is hot and humid.  And, by shower, I don't mean a nice, soaking, 20 minute shower.  Oh, no!  You get wet, turn off the water, lather up, shampoo, etc, then turn the water on to rinse.  That's it! Would we like to take showers more often?  Do we miss long showers? Absolutely! But, we get used to just freshening up with a washcloth instead, and we think about our life on the boat as a microcosm of the reality of the Earth's supply of fresh water. If we all spent more time thinking about using only the water we NEED, not what we WANT, we could protect this limited resource.  In case you did not know, only 3% of the water on Earth is fresh water. Of that, only 1.2% is available for drinking. Here  is a short NASA video about the issue. https://youtu.be/4HSFKwho7MQ

Washing dishes.  In our kitchen, we have two faucets.  One brings up sea water by pushing on a foot pump. For a long time, Gary felt it was safe to use the sea water to wash our dishes.  It probably is when away from land, and if the dishes were always rinsed in fresh water and we always remembered to give them a bleach water spray.  However, that was not always the case and twice I got very, very ill while living on the boat. One time I ended up in the emergency room, very sick, unable to eat or drink anything and very dehydrated.  I don't know for sure if it was the practice of using sea water to wash our dishes or not, but since we switched to fresh water from our tanks only, I have not gotten sick.  However, using precious fresh water to do dishes means we have to be ultra-conservative when we do dishes.  I use a bowl as a basin so I can use less water and still feel like the water is deep enough to clean the dishes.  We try to only use Dawn dish soap because our sink water goes directly out of our boat, not into a tank.  We put the cleaned dishes in the small side of the sink, spray them with the bottle of bleach water, then when the sink is almost full, we use the spray handle to quickly rinse them.  In this way, we can do all the dishes for the day with less than a gallon of water.  

Doing Laundry: Usually we splurge and find a laundry mat that's close enough to walk to, but there are times when we need to do laundry onboard. Again, we try to be very water-conscious.  We used to use buckets on the back deck, but this lifestyle provides more than enough sun, so now I do the laundry in the kitchen sink when nevessary.

And, we have plenty of lines to hang our laundry on.