Boat chores- Water tank

We’d decided we wanted to clean out our fresh water holding tank, as our filter had been clogging pretty quickly and looked icky.  So we were waiting till our water ran out so we could clean it.  Sunday night around 7pm we found ourselves with out water.  So David set to work opening the tank and cleaning it out.  The top of the tank is in the floor of the engine room.  After opening the lid and climbing in he found the tank separated by 3 baffles into compartments with a narrow opening.  We woke Calvin up from bed, it was just after 8 and he had just fallen asleep.  And set him to work thru the baffle holes to scrub down each compartment. 

Rob and Heidi had come by for dinner and luckily were still around and offered their help.  Heidi was quite the trooper in helping empty the shop vac several times after clearing out the dirty cleaning water.  David said when he opened the tank there was a little water left in the bottom and it was very clear, but as we washed down the sides of the tank it became murky and yellow brown—gross.  So they wanted to vacuum out all the murky water before we refilled.

Here in Mexico we run our watermaker to refill our fresh water tank rather than use the water on the dock.  It tests to make sure the water going into the tank is clean and drinkable.  It is then run thru a whole house filter—the one that has been clogging—and goes out to all our pipes.  We then refill drinking water jugs that we keep in the fridge so we always have cold water.  For those we use another counter top water filter that we had taken to Poland with us last year.  So, even though the tank needed a good scrub, our drinking water was getting quite filtered and was clean by the time it reached us.  We are hoping we will cut down on how often we have to clean the whole house filter by cleaning out the tank.