For these reasons, I recommend using rainwater for purposes other than drinking and cooking. And depending on where you are, the rain may have environmental pollutants mixed in. While the rain itself might be safe to drink, it carries dirt or whatever may be on your tarp, or deck. We collected this extra water for showers, laundry and washing dishes. When it rained, we'd collect water trickling down from our aft solar panels into a 20 liter bucket. Some sailors set up tarps to catch and lead the water into Jerrycans, others have the water flow directly into their main tank - I don't recommend doing that unless you've got a good filtration system. Rain catchment is a good way to top-up your tanks. Related: water storage, water filtration & rain. It's a device that is expensive, high maintenance and power-hungry. We chose not to have a desalinator aboard Pino, and have managed well without it. A sure way of preventing contamination, is to check all o-rings and tanks for leaks before leaving. Having separate bins makes for a more resilient system, if salt gets into one tank, it won't corrupt the entirety of your supplies. On passages, we carry extra Jerrycans of water, enough to sustain two people for a few more weeks than the length of our trip. To conserve water, our sink faucet is operated with a foot pump, where each push draws out 60 ml of water, allowing us to measure our usage. When anchored near a port, once a week, we would ferry four bins of 10 liters from shore to the boat. A person needs between 2.7 and 3.7 liters of drinking water each day. Depending on where you are, you'll have to treat it, catch it, carry it or pay for it.īasic needs are covered with a mere 10 liters of water a day per person.
Living on a boat certainly helps to develop a deeper connection to this precious resource.
It's easy to forget that water is not inexhaustible when it flows so readily by the turn of the tap. Meeting these basic needs, while living offgrid, takes but some planning and time. Maslow's pyramid of needs positions as the most basic, or most crucial, physiological needs, like water, food, warmth and rest, followed closely with security and safety. We found that learning to live in communion with our vessel offered a peace of mind previously unimaginable.
When something breaks, we must repair it. When far away from the coasts, we rely on our vessel and what's on it. For us, to live off-grid, is mostly letting go of the numbing culture of convenience and surrounding ourselves with systems we trust for long transits across the ocean. People choose to live off-grid for self-sufficiency, resilience, or ecological reasons. Because of the decentralized nature of our work, this has to be spelled out quite clearly: Preparing for impending apocalyptic events should mean collective action and structural reform, not individualism and isolation.