Your Boat Toilets Suppliers Share Great Ways to Remove Pesky Waterline Stains
Raritan Engineering your boat toilets manufacturers would like to share with you this week some great information regarding how to beat waterline staining.
Summer is here, and our routine maintenance chores now require some serious elbow grease. Our first impulse is to go for the super-strength acids that will take care of the hard growth as well as the stains.
Over the years, Practical Sailor has reviewed several eco-friendly products that do a good job of descaling heat exchangers and removing barnacles. Barnacle Buster from Trac Ecological (Practical Sailor May 2007) and Rydlyme Marine from Apex Engineering (Practical Sailor March 2008) both dissolve calcium carbonate, the main ingredient in lime scale and shell.
Other products like Star brite Zebra Mussel and Barnacle Remover or MaryKate On & Off deal with shell and scale well, but they contain stronger concentrations of hydrochloric acid that give off toxic fumes and are beastly to work with.
Green Cleaners
Even mild cleaners like lemon juice will remove hull wax.
The trouble with brown-yellow waterline stains is that they’re often made up of more than one problem—a combination, for instance, of algae stain, pollen, and tannic-acid stains, plus oil stain, all in a matrix of salt and strange oxides.
We Continue Talking About How to Safely Remove Waterlines From Your Hull
Your boat toilets experts talk about how all but one contained oxalic, hydrochloric, sulfuric, or other acids, or some mixture of them, and all were rated Good or Excellent. This is not chemical rocket science. The overall Best Choice and Budget Buy was Spray Nine’s Boat Bottom Cleaner, a gel containing “multiple acids.”
Most waterline stain removers use harsh acids to banish the brown funk. If the stain isn’t too bad, try cleaning it with concentrated lemon juice first.
One way to reduce the work load is to stay ahead of stains by more regular sponging of the boot-top and waterline. A thorough buff-and-wax job using one of our top-rated hull waxes goes a long way toward keeping the waterline clean. If things start to get ugly, I’ll use milder “green” formulas that fared well in our tests, or any you might recommend.
Don’t forget these great tips for removing pesky waterline stains. 1) Avoid super-strength acids; 2) keep in mind that even mild cleaners like lemon juice will remove hull wax; and 3) try to stay ahead of stains by more regular sponging of the boat-top and waterline.
Solar and battery technology power a novel hurricane resistant floating electric house boat
Arkup, the “avant-garde life on water” company, has designed a new luxury home that integrates solar on the roof and a newly approved lithium ion marine battery system. The main selling features are that it can rise with sea levels via jacks, withstand extreme weather, move as a regular electric propelled boat, and provide it’s own water plus – of course – electricity.
There are no specifications on the solar panels used – merely multiple notations that 30kW of panels can fit on the roof in 2,300 sq feet.
The home’s default design is specified to the marine approved Orca Energy Storage System made by Corvus Energy. The systems are liquid or air cooled lithium ion battery kits. The individual battery packs are 5.7kW each and individual stacks go up to 137kWh.
The Orca system was recently approved by DNV GL – global ocean classification body – as being safe for maritime usage.
The Arkup is powered by an electric propulsion system – adding to Electrek’s electric boat collection. The system can move at up to 7 knots per hour with a range of 300 nautical miles. With its solar propulsion system – it could probably run indefinitely.
Two points from Arkup’s promotional material gives a feel for the market, in addition to luxury, that they’re aiming for:
Sustainable: Environmentally friendly, powered by solar energy, no fuel, zero emission, equipped with waste management, rainwater harvesting and purification systems, our living yachts are totally off-the-grid.
Resilient: Made for all environments and designed to withstand category 4 hurricane winds, our livable yachts are equipped with a hydraulic self-elevating system to prevent from sea sickness and flooding.
Digital drawings from the marketing material:
Electrek’s Take
Building homes like this is more a play on resilience with a whole lot of money than anything else. 30kW of solar and a lithium ion a marine battery system, plus onsite water purification means you can survive independent of any connection to the mainland.
As the group strongly pushes the customizability of the project, they’d be even more sustainable if there were indoor farming options. Maybe we ought suggest to them that they ought build a magenta colored greenhouse as a room?
Click here and see how Raritan Engineering has more information regarding boat toilets and all your other marine sanitation supply needs.
via Conquering (or Coexisting with) Waterline Stains
via Solar and battery technology power a novel hurricane resistant floating electric house boat