Top quality drinking water is one of the most important things on a cruising boat and we’ve just changed the way we get ours to a system we really like. This video goes through our reasons for changing and the fitting of the new gear which gives us excellent pure water straight from our tanks.
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If you are interested in having one of these systems yourself follow this link to the Acuva site and if you use the discount code SAILINGFAIRISLE you will get a 10% discount.
https://www.acuvatech.com/?ref=4sdi3mu14n
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We have always avoided having bottled drinking water aboard, it’s expensive, it’s a really heavy item to take from shore to the boat and worst of all it means you end up with loads of waste plastic which if often impossible to recycle when you’re sailing so it’s going to end up in landfill.
For the first 5 years of living aboard Fair Isle we had a filter system on board from Nature Pure. This has a filter which is capable of filtering out everything down to bacterial level. It has supplied us with clean drinking water for all that time and has done it’s job as we have always had good clean drinking water straight from our tanks.
However the down side of this really fine fiation is the water flow is very slow and quickly becomes a dribble as the filter gets clogged up. I tried adding a prefilter and I also filter the water on the way into the boats tank, but this didn’t help much. We have to change filters frequently, they are difficult to get hold of when you’re sailing and they are very expensive. But even changing often we still had water flow that was far too slow.
So we have now removed those filters and replaced them with the Acuva ArrowMAX system.
From the research I’ve done I believe this will do a better job than the filters of taking all bacteria out of our drinking water. Well to be accurate it doesn’t take it out, it kills it by blasting the water as it flows to the tap with a high intensity ua violate beam. This scrambles the DNA of bacteria and kills them. This has always been a very effective way of purifying water but until now it required expensive and power hungry mercury lamps to deliver the UV light. LED technology however has come to the rescue and the Acuva units use less than an amp while working, and they are only actually working when the water is flowing.
This video goes through the fitting of the unit and the reasons why we changed over to this system as well as some testing.