During our ownership of Mariadz we have had intermittent problems with the aft grey waste box which is fed from the stateroom heads (shower and sink) and also the galley sink. These have usually been as a result of a stuck float switch in the grey water box that gathers it all together before it is pumped away. The result of this has been a bilge full of water, or water stuck in the sink/shower. In the past we have cleaned the grey water box regularly (more precisely Stevie from Watercraft UK has cleaned this out for us and cleaned up the float switch). Basically the scum from the shower and the sink waste after washing up were causing us problems. During the last winter, we decided that we would look at this setup and also upgrade the Whale Gulper pump. The upgrade was to use the toilet version of this pump.  This is equivalent to the more powerful of the two grey water pumps but has a much wider pipe, let’s not linger on why that is required for a toilet pump…..

However, we have started to have problems with the pumping out of grey water again. This started in the last couple of weeks and we noticed that the pump was staying on for a long time and not pumping much water out.  On investigation we found two of the non return valves, to sop the water going back into the pump and grey water box, supplied with the brand new pump by Whale had failed. One of them had turned inside and the other had a split in it. The first problem effectively reversed the non-return valve and so the pump was pushing against a valve trying to stop water going past.  A service kit with replacement valves fixed this problem, I will follow up with Whale though. For the next few days, the pump seemed to work ok, well pretty much as it did before. Then, we noticed the pump performance deteriorating again. We had never previously had problems with the pump part of the grey water system so this was particularly frustrating.

Olly from Seapower had fitted the pump and diagnosed the initial problem as I eagerly watched on. So at least I now knew how to strip the pump down and check for problems – and although the pump has been moved to be more accessible it is still a horrible job of fiddling with pipes and pumps under the floor in the bilge in difficult to get to places. I did this adding a little extra water to our bilge as I went :(. The good news was that I couldn’t find a problem with the non return valves. I decided to swap the top of the Whale pump with our old, working, Whale pump to see if there was a problem with the pump caused by our valve problems previously.  It did exactly the same. I put everything back together so I could show Olly, who was arriving imminently, what was happening. I retested…..now no water was going out, surely I couldn’t have reversed the valves accidentally when I put it back together? Thankfully I hadn’t. Olly and I worked together to try and diagnose the problem. Pump seemed fine, valves were fine (thankfully, that could have been quite embarrassing) but the outlet pipe seemed to be blocked. Now previously when we had the initial problem, Maria and I had put a hose through the this pipe to make sure it was clear but it now appear to be blocked.  When we repeated the technique, the hose water was bouncing back off something.  We went to the other end of the pipe at the  through-hull to see if we could see the blockage.  The pipe itself seemed fine.  However the through-hull seemed to have a problem. There was a ninety degree bend immediately prior to the through-hull so we took this off and found that there was a huge blockage in this. I then set about clearing this out. I found two plastic screw covers (the ones that disguise screws and make them look like the headlining or woodwork. These had jammed across the pipe together, which was little wider than these at the bend. This stopped all flow, especially as they had been packed in with hair and assorted other gunk.  On cleaning this out we put the whole system back together and tested.

Previously, it has taken 30 seconds to clear the grey water box and at bad times up to two minutes. The pump started and I went up to the deck to check for the flow coming out. I peered over the side to see a dribble coming out, deflated I returned to the galley to talk through with Olly our next steps. He seemed happy and said that the pump had finished before I got there! In fact the pump had emptied the box in seven seconds! Even more amazing was that the pump emptied the box so fast that an emptying sink could not fill it quickly enough and so the pump ran and shut down and waited for more water before finishing the job.

So success. And Maria is happy to keep the boat because she can shower!

However, how could we stop these problems recurring. Some time ago we had bought a filter for the shower to stop too much hair getting through and this had worked well catching a lot of hair and needing cleaning regularly. I decided I wanted the same in the galley sinks.

£1.49 at Dunelm Mill gets you one of these stainless steel little puppies that fits the plug hole perfectly, has a very fine mesh that catches rice grains etc and looks like it is standard fit. So all those problems could have been averted for less than two pounds….

We have discussed how we changed the Mariadz navigation to update it and added in Forward Facing Sonar.  With Maria at the helm when we come into bays and marinas, the use of the FFS may be limited by Maria’s ability to see anything 😉 So we have added a small plotter on the helm which will display this output so that Maria has a complete view of what is going on in front of Mariadz.

This of course presented problems with space since the steering column was quite full already and also had a radio stand right next to the compass which of course throws the compass off 😦 . we looked at the design of the standard steering column and were a little confused. Engine hours is important to keep an eye on but does this really need to be on the helm? We decided to move it down below. There were also some redundant switches.  By carefully rearranging the steering column, with Olly from Seapower’s help, we were able to come up with a better design that also fitted in the chartplotter and the control panel for the Forward Facing Sonar.  The radio bracket has been moved away from the compass and the new remote control for the autopilot has also been mounted on the pedestal. Another change was removing the standard key to start and replacing with two buttons.  At the end of the day the keys are all standard and so add no security but can handily (?) break off in the ignition at times.  We just need to make sure that the ignition is switched off from the master control down below to avoid someone taking Mariadz away.  Finally we added LED lights to light up the table when needed.

We are very happy with the results – now to take her down the river and try out the new toys 🙂

Please also note the hand-stitched leather steering wheel cover that Maria and I did with our own fair hands – we don’t make other people do ALL the work 🙂

You don’t need to be on Mariadz very long to know that there is very little compromise if something isn’t working quite right.  We have a theory that the last thing we want to be doing is to be fixing something in the middle of the Pacific or on a remote island if there is any chance of avoiding it.  Other items just don’t look how we want them to.

A perfect example of this later case were the reading lights in all the cabins.  These were original fit and so 15 years old, tarnished, held together with tape and just not what we wanted.  I had already swapped these to replacement LED bulbs but they were still not what we wanted for the place that will be our home for ten years.

But we couldn’t find what we wanted. None of the standard chandleries had the combination of quality and features that we wanted.  We stumbled upon Calibra Marine Equipment at the 2013 Southampton Boat Show.  The first time we looked we loved their selection but they are not cheap.  The lights we liked were LED, touch control (so no prominent switches), adjustable for brightness and looked very nice and modern.  However, we decided to keep looking and couldn’t justify the cost. A year went by with no luck in our search, we returned to the Southampton Boat Show the following year and met the charming South African lady we’d met the year before.  Once again, these were the only lights that we liked.  This time, we decided to bite the bullet and buy a couple for our bedroom. We would have to find a cheaper solution for the other cabins.

The following year we returned to the boat show and bought two more for the fore-peak, but showing lip-service to the concept of a budget bought cheaper units for the bunk room. We are really pleased with the results, although anyone who has been on the boat will also know that the above picture has a glaring omission….where’s Bonnie! One other thing about these pictures, we have to say a big thank you to Anna Chatburn for our gorgeous Mariadz pillow.  As you can see it always has pride of place on the bed. The blue pillows get a pirate and RNLI teddy, Anna’s one gets a cat!

Maria has the full standalone karaoke setup but of course needs all of the lighting too…not quite. This was us trying to be sensible about the likelihood of having to work in darkness at the mast.  The Moody comes with a forward facing deck light which works quite well on the foredeck.  But for working at the mast or the boom we wanted to add some lighting.

So so as part of the electrical refit and moving of various aerials up the mast, we decided to add LED spreader lights (HELLA LED Black Sea Hawk).  These are unbelievably bright and I guess may even work as a security deterrent too 🙂

As we go round the world we want to be self sufficient for power and that means understanding what power is coming in and going out of the batteries. The main type of battery monitor available is an amp hour counter which counts the amps going in and the amps going out.  We went with the e-xpert lite based on Olly’s recommendation.  Over time, these type of monitors become less accurate though and need to be reset but they do provide useful data about what is happening right now such as amps in or out. However, anyone with an understanding of our approach to the refit will not be surprised that we would not be happy with a single way of measuring these things which could become inaccurate. There is another type of battery monitor which has a very complex algorithm within it and measures the battery itself to calculate a percentage of charge in the battery bank. This system actually gets more accurate over time as the algorithm helps it to tune it’s settings to “learn” about the batteries it is monitoring. The combination of these two monitors gives us a powerful way of understanding our power use and state of charge. This will allow us to manage our power use much more effectively.  We can monitor and adjust our power use and it will also help us to understand the effectiveness of our charging mechanisms: engine, shore power, generator and solar power. We will report on how well this works in practice in future posts.

Of course the decision making process was difficult and involved a lot of research and expert impartial advice from Oliver at Seapower who also installed all the equipment for us.

As part of the original fit of the Moody, it had come with an inverter, long since removed by a previous owner, and an HFL generator, which had been scrapped soon after our purchase because it didn’t work and was uneconomical to repair. The entire cooling system had corroded on the original 10.5 KVa generator and although it had a little over 700 hours, it had clearly always been problematic. It was also very noisy with ill fitting sound proof panels and we knew that we would have the same level of problems as the previous owners.

So the generator was removed and we considered our options.  The generator had been sized to allow for all three air conditioning units to be on at the same time without causing an issue. We don’t expect to be running these very often at all and certainly not all three! We suspect what had happened to the generator apart from inadequate maintenance was that it had always been run at a low load hence causing problems with the engine that forms the core of the generator.  Now despite the fact that we still have all three aircon units, a large microwave, watermaker and several other potentially high energy use items, we didn’t think this justified over-specifying the generator. But of course, we would need to cope with higher loads at times…..

A quality inverter charger was a good solution since it would seamlessly top up the power output from the batteries.  This works fine when the high load is for a short period but needs to be watched if this lasts a long time.  No-one wants to drain the entire battery bank in an hour!  This allows the generator to be specified as a little lower power output which means it will more often be used at a reasonable load for the generator. I also means that you need to have good battery monitoring in place and more on that on another post.

Looking at a ten year timescale, we knew we needed to buy a quality product and two in particular stuck out for us: the studer, which had been bought by some good friends of ours ( Clare and Vic on Njord) and the Victron. The victron had some good features but the Studer seemed to have a better reputation for quality.  The clincher for us was the global support network.  They are both good but there are several times more dealers and repair centres for Victron, so in the unlikely eventuality that we had a problem, it would be easier to repair.

Then we started looking at the generator.  We did a lot of research on line and came down to a short list of Northern Lights, Kohler and Onan. There was little to choose between these but the supplier of our electrical systems were also Onan dealers and this helped to sway our minds.  The fact that the generator was a difficult install which required it to be taken apart and taken in pieces to the engine room before being rebuilt was an added complication. By choosing Lindsay at Seapower who works closely with Ollie, meant that this could be done without invalidating the warranty on the generator.

The install is incredibly neat with a remote digital panel on the flight deck that Maria considers our new electrical panel to resemble.  Having spent some time with Lindsay, I have to say we are happy both with our choice of generator and supplier.  Lindsay has taken care making sure that our install will be trouble free for as long as we have the boat. One additional feature we added was to have the hot water from the cooling system feed the hot water boiler.  The generator creates a lot of heat and it seems a shame to throw that away into the sea when it could be used o provide a useful source of hot water for us.  It also means that we have redundancy in the hot water if the heating element breaks.

Sorry the pictures are all a bit boring, the key here is that everything is done under the surface so that the boat is powered well at anchor, at sea or in a marina with limited power.

Actually, an advantage we have found straight away in the Marina is that we no longer need to worry about switching off the electric fire when we want to boil the kettle.  Previously this always tripped the switches but now the boat can support this for a short time from the batteries and then recharges the batteries later.  We think this will be quite useful when we are away for small intense loads like the kettle or microwave although we need to be careful about the rate that we deplete the batteries as well as the amount of power we take out.

The original electrical panel was still in place on the Moody and this had various additions added to it over the years. On the left hand side there were two chart plotters. The Raymarine was original fit and was linked to the similar unit in the cockpit.  Around about 2010, AIS had been added and rather than upgrade the navigation a decision was taken to add an additional plotter to show the AIS information. Personally the thought of going below to check the AIS track of a large ship that may be on a collision course sounded like madness.  Also with our plans to go round the world we didn’t expect the original navigation to last 25 years without trouble.  So the decision was taken to upgrade the Raymarine navigation and remove the redundant setup. We considered other manufacturers but we have been comfortable with Raymarine equipment and so decided to stay loyal to the manufacturer, also thinking that it should be quite easy for us to understand how it worked since it would be an evolution from the equipment we were used to. Of course an upgrade from that period meant that the existing radar set up would have to be replaced.

Thats when the fun started, so firstly there was a deal where we could get the fish finder add on for the cost of the sensor – anyone who knows Maria’s fishing ability will know that this is money well spent….we will never see any fish on it!

We were also thinking about our plans to travel and the knowledge that the likelihood the charts will not be accurate.  For that reason we thought it would be worth looking at Forward Facing Sonar (FFS) so that we can see exactly what is in front of us and hopefully therefore avoid hitting it! Now on the East Coast, where we have very shallow water and mud, there is an unwritten rule that if you haven’t touched the mud you probably aren’t really trying ;). We are very careful these days having touched the bottom once in the Dufour but I am guessing that running into a reef will be no laughing matter so FFS it is.  It looked like the Echopilot was the best fit for us and integrated with everything else. We have combined that with a 7inch plotter which will show this view to Maria at the helm. I am led to believe that the purchase of this equipment was no reflection of a lack of trust in my ability to tell Maria if we are going too shallow but a niggling doubt remains… 🙂

Anyway, we also took the opportunity of another trade in deal with Raymarine to modernise our autopilot. We are hoping that the new equipment will help us to have fewer breakdowns and repairs in the future or at the very least have spare parts available. I wouldn’t fancy finding a spare part for a 20 year old plotter on a small desert island. So we have three plotters: nav station down below, next to the companionway and a smaller display on the steering binnacle for Maria to see her FFS as well as all the other functionality.

Finally, we changed all of the small instruments above the companionway to complete the modernisation.

None of this would have been possible without the excellent advice and work of Oliver from Seapower Marine. He has been wonderful and I think has kept the cost down as much as possible while making Mariadz as fault free as is humanly possible.  He has even identified and rectified water damage from the fresh water used to put out the fire in the galley all those years ago.