Well, today was a very good day. I fired up Freyja at around 8:30 this morning and headed out into Banderas Bay to run my PUR PowerSurvivor 80 II (nka Katadyn) [MROD 80-II-2 (Modular)] water maker for the first time in the 5 years that I’ve owned the boat. For a week or two (not full time :) ) I'd been studying the manual and opening the compartment with all the machinery and plumbing and trying to decipher the hoses and valves. So I was ready. All the pundits and spectators on the dock (including, actually, me myself) were very skeptical about it working after its being criminally ignored for at least 5 years. The two membranes that the high pressure pump pushes the water through on this PUR Powersurvivor 80 II cost almost $400 each, and might have been ruined by being ignored for so long. You are supposed to run biocide through them (called pickling) every so often, but opinions differ on how often. I found the big guru wise man of my kind of water maker, Gary Albers, who had posted the book he wrote about them on the internet. He seemed to say that with an initial proper pickling they should last “for years” if no new water was introduced into them, though he did recommend more frequent pickling than ever 5 years. With my fingers crossed, after I was a mile out into the Bay, away from any oil or chemical pollution, I turned it on. The first test was, of course, whether it would even turn on! It did. Test #2 was whether it would produce 3 gallons of water an hour. It did! An hour later, I had about 12 liters, which is close enough for water makers. The next test was to taste some of the last water out of it, so I put the hose into a glass and watched it start to fill with beautiful crystal clear reverse osmosis water. It smelled like, well, like nothing, it didn't smell! That was a good sign. And then, it tasted like really good pure fresh water. Hooray! So, for the final test, I went back to the dock and had a pal bring his electronic TDS meter over to test for total dissolved solids, including salt. The reading was 420, which is well within spec for a very healthy couple of $400 apiece water maker membranes! Another hooray! According to the guru, I should get at least another couple of years of use out of them, if I use them properly, and apparently longer if I pickle them. Life is also good on another front. Since getting my two 185 watt Kyocera solar panels hooked up to my Blue Sky 3024i Controller I haven't had to plug into the shore power now for maybe 3 weeks. The batteries are full at the end of each charging day (about 5 pm when the sun gets so low that the panels go to sleep). I was seeing 23.7 amps today because I was running the inverter to run the vacuum cleaner to blow the water out of Bill's TDS meter that I sorta accidentally got water inside of assuming, natch, that it would be water proof. That is a lot of power! I’m averaging making about 90 to 105 amps a day. I’m making ice and keeping my big old original Passport 40 refrigerator and freezer as cold as I want to. The lights are mostly LED now, both inside and outside the boat, so they don’t use much power. I’m charging computers, watching movies, etc. The days have been pretty sunny or totally sunny, so I’ll see what happens with cloud cover, and also with the autopilot going 24/7, and various nav instruments and radar being used on and off day and night for a few weeks. I might have to motor a bit to charge the batteries, but I’m hoping not! The state of the art Blue Sky 3024i MPPT charge controller really can do some magic to the high voltage the panels are putting out. The emptier the batteries, the more amps it cranks out. So, today I'm happy with my water maker Fool's Luck!