It’s going to look like this

All the supports are inside the tank, screwed into the aluminum.

They’re more-or-less lined up, and they sit about as level as anything in a boat can sit. Which is to say, not level enough for billiards, but level enough that the olive doesn’t get knocked out of my martini glass.

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Here are cardboard templates for the three parts of the upper bunk for the 35 gallon bladder.

The bottom 15 gallon bladder is back-ordered, giving me more quality to paint. 

Ideally, I can get two coats on between Saturday and Sunday. Unless it’s so cold Saturday that we don’t want to go out to the boat.

Measuring the space (yet again) I see that it’s a very, very tight fit for these two bladders. I don’t think the bottom bladder can be filled completely because of the narrowness of the V. 

We’ve never been able to use this tank. So a ¾-full 15 gallon bladder and a 35 gallon bladder is vastly better than what we have now.

For the fresh-water systems, we want to clean the starboard tank, and start tearing apart the port tank.

We can’t do this until we get the sails out of the saloon. Doing a job this big only on weekends is challenging. But. When I stack this against other people’s life challenges, this is hardly even worth complaining about.

When the bladder arrives, then we can clean it. Imtra has a cleaning procedure that’s very important.

Before using your water tank for the first time, partly fill the tank with warm water (122 ̊F/50 ̊C) and a 1% solution of mild detergent. After a few minutes, rinse with clear water and fill again with water treated with chlorine tablets (follow package instructions for a 5% concentration). Empty after 2 hours and carefully and thoroughly rinse with clear water. This procedure should be performed with the system fully installed so that all the piping undergoes the same treatment.

Maybe we’ll do this on deck where we can drain the bladder with gravity instead of the boat’s fresh-water pump.

They recommend cleaning every 6 months. Perhaps this means that I want to put a drain cock down in the bilge to let gravity drain the tanks during cleaning?

For long-term storage, they recommend 10% chlorine in a partially-filled bladder. This seems to be an insane amount of chlorine. We suspect this is really 0.1%. We suspect this is a good idea for the other tanks, also, and we’re going to try and remember to do this. It does mean keeping a close eye on water levels to judge how many chlorine pills to get to 10% chlorine levels.

© Steven Lott 2021