Onboard water quality testing

We have never had a need to do full testing as will be required in the near future but only checked for chlorides and minimum buffer on the bacteriacide. Compliance with IHR and MLC is a whole new world.

From my experience with Kittiwake testing kits/cabinets for potable and boiler feed water as well as fuel oil, I would not hesitate to spec their kits to comply with the new regs.

Finding a yacht engineer to use them properly, keep them stocked with fresh chemicals, and keep proper records is another matter though.

Maybe a lurker from the cruise industry will chime in with current information on their latest approach to this since they have been doing it forever.

Unless I am mistaken, a sample still has to go ashore in order to obtain a valid certificate and the onboard testing is just part of the documentation of maintenance and treatment.

I haven't gone that deeply into it yet since I am one of those last minute types but your post has motivated me to start looking at it ... thanks I think.

Hi,

I wrote to a guy I know who has recently left the Cruise ships asking about this.

This was his response.

With the Pot water testing, on cruise ships we just tested for coliforms/ecoli and chlorine content.

Choliform/ecoli was tested when bunkering and monthly from 5 points onboard. (24hrs in incubator so don’t use these tanks until you have results....not exactly practical on a yacht!!!)

Chlorine must be above 2ppm when bunkering or by water makers to the tanks....then must be between (0.2ppm and 2ppm) at the furthest point (bridge) where we had a chart recorder analysing content. So we had two chlorine injection points, 1 before tanks and 1 before distribution to the ship. Chart calibration was done daily and if chart out of order we tested every 4 hours manually for chlorine content. (This was with a hand held HACH chlorine analyser and reagent sachets)

With fewer people using chlorine as a bactericide this can be a problem for the ones who use something else such as UV. On ships where we didn't chlorinate, we didn't really have any thing to test. All we could do is make sure the evap temps were correct, the chlorides were down and the UV lights were working. But we made water almost constantly when well offshore because we didn't have much more storage than a large yacht so holding it for testing was a luxury that didn't exist.

We didn't have to worry about giving 3000 passengers the runs either.

On a fish factory ship we had two evaporators the size of locomotives plus a pair of standard 12000 gpd evaps for potable water and chlorinated everything. The factory techs had their own chlorinators and ran full lab tests on their water constantly plus kept amazing records since they were making a food product. We had a chlorine injector in the engine room for the potable water and used the little sachet things to check throughout the accommodation and galley to make sure the residual was correct.

While I appreciate the need to make sure crew and guests aren't reduced to getting their drinking water from a rain barrel, I can't help but to think this water testing onboard yachts thing is another of those solutions looking for a problem.

Hi,

IMO, It joins a whole list of 21st Century idiocy under the guise of Rules and Regulations often under the banner of safe ships, clean seas.