Blood and Coffee

January 26, 2016

blood-and-coffee

Yep, if there’s blood… There must be boat work!

We’ve been working away on the boat for the entire three weeks or so that we’ve been in Tauranga. I think today was our first day off. We took it off because we finished some major engine work including a new rear main oil seal and new engine mounts.

Tomorrow, Legacy gets hauled out of the water for bottom painting. But first, we’re going to water and garnet blast off the old bottom paint, 27 years worth.


Here’s what we’ve done…

Installed a new heater for boat and hot heater
Installed shower WarmerUpper
Replaced anchor chain
Relocated extra anchor rode
Replaced boom vang spring
Rebuilt windlass
Replaced broken stereo
Moved stereo speakers
Installed a new fresh water pump
Added an indicator light on fresh water pump
Re-plumbed head sink
Fixed sticking head drawer
Moved refrigerator temperature sensor
New glasses for both of us
Moved data to new hard disks
Placed stateside (Amazon) order
Updated cruising information pages on our blog
Replaced engine fresh water pump
Installed new engine mounts
Replaced leaking engine rear main oil seal
Remounted rudder sensor

And yet to do…

  • Find and fix fresh water leak
  • Dentist for Cyndi
  • Skin doctor
  • Eye doctor
  • Visa extension
  • Lanyard for Espar heater exhaust cap
  • Rewire Espar heater connector
  • Tie up Espar air intake
  • Get chain test results
  • Straighten and secure spreaders
  • Carpet companionway steps
  • Final check of engine alignment
  • New autopilot pump connectors
  • New toilet seat
  • Outboard engine fuel vent
  • Outboard carb, clean jets
  • Clean outboard fuel tank
  • Install refrigerator fan relay
  • Replace secondary refrigerator fan
  • Install 220 volt inverter for printer
  • Install new bilge blower
  • New engine vent hoses
  • Fix deck leak over stereo
  • Fix head door latch
  • Seal stanchions
  • Update sat phone firmware
  • Replace water maker pumps
  • Replace autopilot hydraulic pump
  • Remount watermaker pumps
  • Lube extra bow roller
  • Glue old faucet holes
  • Clean bilge
  • Install new bilge pump and pump switch
  • Replace Seagull filter hoses
  • Make refrig shelf
  • update and test mailasail
  • hf radio noise issue
  • Bonding wire to arch
  • Seal solar panel wire holes in Bimini
  • deck chip on port by cockpit
  • Battery hold downs
  • Epoxy overboard pole
  • New offline wikipedia copy
  • Get DANBoater policy
  • Fix stripped propane cover screws
  • Check cutlass
  • Wax hull
  • Lube prop
  • Check prop freeplay
  • replace head houses
  • replace head thru-hulls
  • Replumb sink drain, new thru hull

Ain’t boating grand!? Or ten grand!? Or fifty grand!? -Rich

Update… We went out for a test spin on the way to the boatyard and what a difference the new engine mounts make! The engine is much quieter, very smooth and there is very little vibration transmitted through the hull. I ran it up to full throttle and Cyndi said it all: “There’s no drama!”

Is Simple Better?

January 20, 2015

It’s a common question that’s probably been around as long as boats. Is simple better? Does the KISS principle have any place in boating?
My friend Tom sent me an email the other day. He’s an old-school boater. If he had his way, he’d be cruising in a hollowed out ancient growth log using petrified woolly mammoth hair for rigging. Here’s his email…

I just looked at your recent blogs. It makes me wonder about all the odds and ends that require power, maintenance time and worry. If all the gadgets were to fail, could you still get from point A to B? Do you practice Celestial Navigation? Do you carry a handheld GPS that’s not dependent on external power? Spare bateries for the handlheld? Does your windlass have a hand crank in case your batteries fail? Am I being a pain? These are the kind of things I think about when sitting around, waiting [at work].

simple-complex

Some think simple is better: less cost, less to maintain, less to go wrong, and so on. On the other side there’s Legacy. We have what we feel we need to be comfortable, even though that means more maintenance and cost.
Here’s our argument. For us and most of the people we meet out here, this is a way of life, not a day sail. We hope to be out here for years, not days, weeks or months. We wake up every single morning on the boat and go to sleep at night here as well. We spend the majority of our waking hours on Legacy. This is our home, not a kayak we’re paddling down the Amazon to set the record for most or least of something or another. For us, part of enjoying day-to-day life is comfort. Don’t we all want comfortable lives? Adventure and novelty is also very important to us. What could possibly be better than exploration and adventure in comfort?
If this was a limited-time “mission,” we could make do with fewer luxury items. For example, if our goal was to sail around the world in 18 months, we’d know that all the comforts of home life were waiting. In our case, those comforts could still be ten years away. We could make do with fewer luxury items if we had to (and we do when things break – at least until a fix or replacement is available).
During a passage to Hawaii, our alternator broke. Our solar panels couldn’t keep up and we lost all the boat systems, one by one. We were taking saltwater showers, all the electronics we depend on were turned off, and, heaven forbid, we were even doing watches with our eyes while sitting in the cockpit like a bunch of barbarians! (We usually keep watch below decks using radar.) We called this “Pardeying” after Lynn and Larry Pardey, the cruising authors who advocate an extremely simple boat, even forgoing electric lights and an engine. While we survived this and got to Hawaii safely, we didn’t enjoy it and would definitely not choose it as a way of life.
When I was younger, I seemed to need less comfort. Maybe I was tougher? Maybe I just didn’t know how good a comfortable life could be? Whatever the reason, it seems like a good idea to cruise on a simple, smaller boat while young, before you need larger and more complex boat. That ship has sailed for me (sorry). I’m older now… I know better.

mansion-outhouse

Couldn’t I ask the same about a house? Why isn’t simple better there too?
Why do you have a refrigerator when an ice chest would work just as well? Stop for a block each day on your way home from work. A toilet seems frivolous when a hole in the backyard would do the job. And a Sun Shower would alleviate the need for some of that troublesome indoor plumbing.
We’ve had houses. They’ve required constant maintenance. Expensive maintenance. Worry and stress about paying for that maintenance. We’ve had to replace dishwashers, refrigerators, heaters, plumbing, wiring and more. (Don’t even get me started on the constant work the yard required.) We were even required to do a very expensive earthquake retrofit. It would have cost much less, and been far simpler to level the house and put a nice tent on the slab. Simple. No worries (and no comfort!).
The best case I can make for simple is going with what you can afford. The complexities (luxuries?) are expensive. I could do without a lot if it meant the difference between cruising or not. (Hey, kind of the same with a house. Can’t afford a house with two bathrooms? We make do with one. No dishwasher? No problem. Maybe the house I can afford doesn’t have the kitchen I want, but I can still cook Pop Tarts in it.)
I find boat maintenance far more enjoyable than house maintenance ever was. I like making the boat better, more convenient, and more comfortable, along with more seaworthy. Problem solving on the boat is a creative outlet for me. What else am I going to do? Scrimshaw? And I like being compared to MacGyver for fixing a problem at sea with a paperclip, an old toothpaste tube and some dental floss. Keeping all the systems purring is a point of pride for me.

us-in-tahiti2

I also feel I need to keep the most important system on the boat purring. Cyndi! (I’m going to try to do this next bit without sounding sexist.)
I think that often, the cruising dream is stronger in one partner than in the other. Sharing this experience with the one I love is priceless. Anything I can do to make this better for Cyndi is well worth it for me. We’ve seen too many people out here without regard for their partners needs. You know what they’re called? Single handers!
It turns out that my partner’s wants are very much in line with mine, but if I needed to install a watermaker, or a luxurious hot water shower to keep her happy, I’d do it in a flash. (The truth is, I might enjoy the hot water showers even more than she does!)
To address Tom’s other points, we do have backup GPS devices. Many. Our phones not only have GPS capabilities, but complete navigation systems including charts. Even our cameras have a GPS. We could take a picture, and get our latitude and longitude. We are so confident in these back up systems that we got rid of 20 pounds of paper charts the other day. We gave away our sextant last year. I hadn’t touched it in three years.
And, yes Tom, you are being a pain, but that’s what you do, and I appreciate it! I think the best friends are ones that make you think. -Rich

Shower WarmerUpperer

January 19, 2016

shower-warmerupperer

After the addition of our new, wonderful, amazing, incredible, fabulous hot water system (post here), we made another incremental improvement. We added a valve to send the cold water left in the pipes back to the water tank, to make way for the luxurious hot water without wasting a drop (fresh water’s precious on Legacy!).

It’s the valve near the bottom of the picture. It takes hot water from just below the shower faucet and has a hose that runs back to our main fresh water tank. You can feel the valve get warm after just 10 or 15 seconds. Then turn off the valve, and the shower’s ready.

I’ve always wanted to do this. Normally, we start with showering our legs or feet – areas of the body that don’t convulse or go into shock when hit with cold water. Now, even those parts don’t have to suffer.


On a related subject, that garden sprayer in the picture is our shower head. We had the typical one that doubled as a sink faucet, but some fool decided that they couldn’t be allowed to shut the water off completely else the badly made rubber hose would explode. This constant dribble of water isn’t very good for those of us trying to conserve water.

Enter the garden sprayer. It has seven selectable spray patterns and does shut off completely while you shampoo.  We use the “mist” patter as it gives a forcefull rince while using very little water. When we’re in a marina with lots of fresh water nearby, we use the “shower” pattern for a very satisfying shower experience. The “jet” is handy for cleaning. We really, really like this even though it might not look all that classy. (Our friend called it our redneck shower head.) I’d even do this if and when we return to land life. -Rich

120V to 230V Boat Conversion

January 18, 2016

I see boats sitting at the dock with the engine running for hours at a time, making noise, making diesel exhaust fumes for their neighbors and using up expensive engine lifetime, all for no reason. Oh, they’d say it’s to charge batteries. They’re always US or Canadian boats. They have 120 volt systems, while the rest of the world uses 220 to 240 volts.

They’ve often been told that they’d need to spend thousands to rewire their boat. They’d need to comply with a multitude of regulations and get a Warrant of Fitness (NZ) every year at a cost of hundreds of dollars. Wrong-o-buck-o! There’s a better way.

battery-charger

Maybe we stumbled into this blindly, or maybe we’re just cheap, or maybe just lucky, but what we did for under $200 has been working so well for us.

When we first got to Opua, New Zealand four years ago, we bought and “installed” a very inexpensive, 10 amp charger (ours happens to be made by Victron Energy but there are many to choose from). We cut off the alligator clips and wired the output side into our 12 volt system. I put “installed” in quotes because we left the NZ AC plug intact.

We plug the charger into an inspected (WOF’ed) power cord and leave it on all the time (or at least we did, before we had more solar power than we know what to do with!). Each year in NZ, we need to get our cord inspected, but that’s $25 or so – much less than getting the all the boat’s wiring inspected.

I’ve called this a trickle charger, only because of the low, 10 amp charging rate, but it’s not a typical trickle charger. It’s actually a sophisticated, 4 stage charger that won’t harm batteries if left on indefinitely. Ten amps isn’t much, but multiply it by 24 hours and we’re talking 240 amp-hours. That’s more than we can use, especially when supplemented by even moderate solar or wind power.

For AC, at least the US and Canadian 110 volt flavor, we use our inverter. We plug our little 230 volt space heater into a Y connector, plugged into the power cord. That’s also how we connect or New Zealand purchased power tools.

Done. That’s it. No rewiring. No excessive engine or generator hours. No annoyed neighbors. No hassle. -Rich

I Took a Shower!

January 16, 2016

… a warm, wonderful, luxurious shower!

“So, what’s the big deal?” you ask. (Or maybe, “It’s about time!)

The big deal is this: When we installed our amazing new solar panel and controllers, there was an unintended consequence. We no longer needed the two or three hours every other day of engine running to keep the batteries charged. In fact, we only ran the engine once during the entire cruising season for charging alone. Running the engine made hot water. No engine running – no hot water. That’s not a big deal in the tropics but here in New Zealand, it’s a disaster!

So when our hot water heater tank started leaking, and we found out it would be over $1000 to replace it in New Zealand, we looked for other options. Enter our new Espar (Eberspächer) Hydronic heater.

espar-heater

Just before we left for the tropics in 2012, I installed one of these heaters. (Yea, smart, I know… installing a heater before heading to the tropics, but I knew NZ was in our future – or at least Cyndi knew!) We knew we needed to run this heater once a month or so to keep it working, but we didn’t. Water got in the air intake and it seized up. The replacement parts for repairing it were more than a new heater, so it just sat there, non-functional for a couple of years.

A new one (about the same price as a new traditional boat water heater) seemed like the solution to all our troubles. We could use the new heater to heat the boat on cold NZ mornings when not at a dock, and with the addition of a heat exchanger, we could make hot water (so the theory went). We ordered both from England and now they’re installed and working better than I could have ever imagined.

My imagination was limited by the lack of data available on the heat exchanger. I tried doing the math to see if this combination would give us enough hot water. No data… no math. I found mention of this combination on Cruisers Forum but nothing conclusive as to the results from those who’d tried it. I’d have to go on faith.

Our Webasto Plate Exchanger, installed.
Our Webasto Plate Exchanger, installed.

It seems like plate-type heat exchangers are pretty common, but not on boats. I’d never seen one before. This one by Webasto was hard to find. I found only one company who sold them and they were also in England. I could have bought a generic plate exchanger, but this one included a mixing valve and I thought that might be useful.

Now it works:

The heater heats antifreeze and pumps it through the system, first to the plate heat exchanger for the hot galley and head water, then through a small radiator with a fan for cabin heat. It stores no hot water, but we still have a limited supply for a short time after the heater is turned off.

The plate heat exchanger is clever. It’s made from about 25 stamped, stainless plates, smashed together and brazed. Fresh water flows through every other plate pair, coolant through the neighboring plates. It’s very compact and very efficient. There is a thermostatically controlled bypass valve that keeps the product water from getting too hot by mixing in some cold water. I think this is a nice, though not completely essential, addition.

The Results:

Wow, wow, wow!!! After running the heater for three minutes, there’s all the hot, hot, hot water you could ever want (limited only to the supply of fresh water on hand). The temperature is not only hot enough (too hot without mixing in some cold water), but incredibly consistent. Our boat shower is now much nicer than many we’ve had in houses and hotels. (Coupled with our sophisticated shower head.)

I don’t understand why every cruising boat doesn’t have this setup!

The Sources:

It was kind of hard finding the parts, and I ate up more than a few GB in the search. Here’s what I went with…

The heater, we bought from Heatso (UK). They were great! Very fast, and very professional. I do not hesitate to recommend them. The heater we bought is the (Eberspächer) Hydronic II D5S along with the installation kit and SmartStart Select controller.

The heat exchanger is a Webasto “motor home plate heat exchanger with mixing valve 4111209A” from Buttler Technik in the UK. There service was great, once I figured out I had to use PayPal as they had problems accepting international credit cards.

By the way, the mixing valve is an LK 550-22.


flex-a-lite-640-replacement-car-heater

This is the radiator and three-speed blower we have installed. They’re available as add-on or replacement heaters for cars. We have only one and it’s in the galley. Even on the coldest mornings, the boat is warm about five minutes after turning the heater on.

We have no thermostat for the fan. I thought I’d build one eventually, but now I don’t feel the need.

It might have been better to install a few, smaller radiators around the boat with almost silent computer fans, but this was a simple solution and since I first installed it when we were already late leaving for the tropics, I was in a hurry.

I got the radiator from J. C. Whitney. It’s a  Flexalite 640 Heater.


I installed a reservoir tank like the one in this picture. My thoughts were that this would allow for coolant expansion (really not necessary as the rubber hoses do this), make an easy place to fill the system and check the coolant level, and finally, add some coolant volume to the system. I probably should have gone with a slightly larger tank (I’d say mine holds about a liter), but this is working just fine.

I can’t remember where I bought this tank. You might try to search Google images for “aluminum reservoir tank.”


I’ve said nice things about the companies that I purchased the parts from, but I would be remiss without adding a comment about Espar’s TERRIBLE documentation. Hey guys, just because you put it on a CD, doesn’t mean it isn’t CRAP!!! I feel good about the quality of the heater, but it was a difficult install, largely because of the poor documentation and even though I was replacing another, very similar Espar heater. This project is not for the faint of heart.

Please email me if you’d like more details about the installation. -Rich

Update, October 23, 2019

I’d hoped that the flexibility of the hoses would be enough to allow for the expansion of the coolant, but I don’t think it’s so. The heater leaks a little coolant from the coolant tank, enough that I have to top up the fluid every six months or so. I added this simple expansion tank to the reservoir…

I would have just purchased a plastic, after-market tank at an auto parts store but they’re not available here in NZ so a soda bottle and a 3D printed holder did the trick.

Update, February 27, 2016

After using it for a while now, it remains one of the best things we’ve done on our boat. In the interest of fair, balanced reporting, here are the negatives:

  1. We occasionally smell diesel exhaust from the heater. This only happens as the heater starts up and the wind is in the right direction. It doesn’t last long.
  2. When we get in from a long motoring run, there’s no hot water. We have to run the heater for a whole three minutes to get our hot water! Three minutes! OK, I guess I can wait that long 😉
  3. I feel bad about running the heater when we’re tied up at a dock with neighbors (we do it anyway, but I feel bad). I feel bad about both the noise (we didn’t install the muffler that came with the heater and I hear from people that it really helps quiet the system) and the exhaust smell that might blow into their boats. In truth, this really hasn’t been a problem.

Update, March 5 2017

Check out this post: shower-warmerupperer. It saves us quite a bit of water.

I’ve had a couple of questions about the system and one thing I’ve been suggesting is that it might be best to run the coolant to the plate heat exchanger first, before any of the radiators. I think it’s best to get the hottest water possible to the fresh water heat exchanger.

At the Wooden Boat Festival in Tasmania, I found a company that sells many of the components necessary to install a system like ours. Here’s their website: DieselHeat.com.au