Ensuring Safe Drinking Water Onboard Your Boat: 3 essential steps to follow to have safe drinking water on board. Making sure you have safe drinking water onboard the boat is crucial for your health and well-being. To achieve this, regularly sanitize water tanks, use a filtration system, and keep water containers clean. By taking these simple yet important steps, you can ensure that the water you consume while boating is safe and free from contaminants.
Avoid the dangers and make sure you have safe drinking water onboard your boat or RV. Here’s how…
The issue of clean water is relevant wherever we work, live or play. When our home or hobby is a mobile unit, rather than a static dwelling it can be more difficult to achieve a safe water supply. I’m going to base this article as it applies to our boat. We live onboard full time, and safe drinking water onboard is very important to us.
About 10 years ago we changed our boats aging galvanised steel water tank for a pair of new plastic ones with a much-increased capacity. There wasn’t room for a single large tank so two smaller interconnected ones made much more sense, particularly because ballast in a boat has to be considered.
After removing the old tank, we removed a side inspection cover that was not visible with the tank fitted. On removal we were shocked by the mess, muck and filth there actually was in the tank! Fortunately, we had never used the tank for drinking water, preferring instead to keep a 5-litre tub of water aboard, taken directly from the mains tap on the marina. We also make a point of filtering that same water before using it.
Seeing the internal state of our old tank gave me pause for thought about we could possibly have safe drinking water onboard if it was stored in a tank that itself was contaminated by all that muck. It also made it chrystal clear just how easy it could be for water contamination to exist or develop in water storage tanks on boats and RV’s etc. Let’s consider this and do something about it.
Flushing your water tank
If your water system has not been cleaned for some time you can do yourself a favour by emptying as much water as you can from the system, refill and drain again. The 400ml bottle of Puriclean will treat a 60 gallon, 270 litres tank. So assuming a 60 gallon tank pour half of the Puriclean into the water tank and half fill your tank. Pour in the rest of the Puriclean and top up the tank. Open your taps until the air is bled out and close taps. Top up the tank with water and leave overnight or so.
If your tank is bigger or smaller, adjust the quantity of Puriclean to suit pro rata.
Drain the tank completely then refill and drain again. This will santitise everything in the system. Fill your tank again and you’re good to go!
Puriclean. This is the one we use. Inexpensive but will clean your entire system including the tank, pipes and every other part of your attached water system. 400g is enough for 270 litres or 60 gallons. In countries where Puriclean is not easily available without importing it, I’ve replaced it with a locally available product that will do the same job.
Bleach can be used for tank sanitizing, but this can leave odour – particularly in plastic tanks.
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Check the suitability of your water fill pipe
The next thing to consider is how you fill up your water tank. If you use a hosepipe of your own, make sure that it is of the ‘potable water’ type. This is a type of pipe that will not dissolve contaminants from the pipe itself and is designed to be used with drinking water. When you’ve finished using your pipe, drain it and keep it out of direct sunlight. When you use the pipe again, flush it before you fill your tank, to get rid of insects or dust etc.
Recognising potentially dangerous hosepipes
One thing to avoid at all costs is the ubiquitous old hosepipe that has been on the marina tap for what seems like forever. Why? Simple enough. In warmer weather all sorts of flora and fauna make their homes in there. As the weather cools many of the living creatures inside the pipe will die off, ready to contaminate your water tank. To ensure safe drinking water onboard you need to treat the system.
When these old pipes freeze, they are of course, unusable. However, as the pipes thaw the ice inside the pipe acts as an abrasive. If you run the tap and catch the ice in a bucket, you’ll be amazed to see the detritus that the ice has scoured out. The action of the ice also makes the pipe even more dangerous to use, because it has also scoured out the inner lining of the pipe making it easier for the bad guys to hook on again and continue the contamination. How could you possibly believe that you have safe drinking water onboard if you’re filling the tank from a pipe in that state.
How to avoid stale water in your boat or RV
From a simplistic point of view, it’s never a good idea to leave drinking water stood too long. It can take on the taint of metal or plastic and become quite unpleasant. If you are not going to use the water for some time, drain the tank.
Boiling water
I’ve not previously mentioned boiling the water you use as drinking water. It is, of course, the natural thing to do if you’re making tea or coffee, and it really does help. However, for cold drinking water, if you have any concerns at all about the water on your boat, use a good quality water filter filled directly from a local standpipe that is connected to the main water supply. Better safe than sorry….
Conclusion
There are potentially a multitude of contaminants and waterborne diseases that affect water sources, and in turn, water storage systems. It’s a known belief that running water tends to be safer than still / stagnant water. If you decontaminate and treat your water tanks and pipes each season, and if you use and refill that same system regularly, you are likely to have far fewer issues with your water quality and have a reliable source of safe drinking water onboard.
I always tend to use proprietary products when I clean our own water system for a simple reason. I know exactly how much water there is in our freshwater system, so I know exactly how much treatment is required to deal with the job in hand resulting in safe drinking water onboard. There are more basic treatments, such as bleach and iodine to mention only two, but I avoid these and other similar treatments because I prefer the tested certainty of good quality water treatment systems. The choice of course, is yours.
If you want to know more about safe drinking water onboard a broader description that is interesting and informative is available on this link to Wikipedia
Since this article is about water and water safety, you may want to know how calorifiers work. A calorifier is where your hot water is stored and heated.
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