Saturday 10 September 2011

Water Storage Issue Fixed….. I hope!

Today I took some time to reconsider the issue of Waiouru’s storage capacity.  The plan was to use the bow compartment.  Gas bottles will go into a locker in the semi-trad cockpit.

Anyway, after looking at the shape of the bow I realised the cross section shapes in the vertical and horizontal planes are basically triangles.  Essentially the compartment is the shape of half an inverted pyramid.  The formula for calculating the volume of a pyramid is v=1/3base x height and one cubic foot contains 6.23 gallons.  So I produced a simple spreadsheet with the dimensions as variables.  The bow will hold approximately 90 gallons.  Andy, the boat builder, thought the compartment would hold 250 gallons.  As a “sanity check” I calculated 250 gallons as being equal to six x 44 gal drums and then asked myself would they fit into the bow compartment.  I suspect NOT!

So we will need to find more storage capacity. 

The idea of using the blackwater tank (before it gets connected to the toilet system Smile) has been discarded. 

There appears to be two other options.

1.  We could add another shallow water tank under the floor in the bedroom.  We have the full height of the bilge to use as there is no ballast (Waiouru has a 20mm baseplate).  This would provide approximately 100 gallons of storage. 

2.  We could use the area under the foredeck (cratch).  This would give us another 150 gallons.  However we would have to forego our planned cargo storage compartment.

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