Shore Water Pressure Reducer Safety

[Bash]

Originally Posted by osirissail

Over the years, especially in the islands I have seen shore fresh water pressures getting up to 80 psi. This has caused piping/hose joints to leak inside the boat. In these circumstances I put the RV pressure regulator on the dock spigot before the garden hose that runs to the ship's water inlet. Garden hoses burst quite frequently at that high a pressure and they are not cheap down island.

This is a good point. My boat came with a shore water hookup, but we prefer to use the tanks to keep them fresh. Once however, when we ran low on water up in the Delta and were spending a night in a marina on the way back, we decided to use the shore water hookup because we didn't like the taste of the marina water and didn't want to fill our tanks with it.

Our system has a pressure reducer immediately inside the boat, so I didn't bother to put one between the shore spigot and the hose. Sure enough, it was a hot day, and within a few hours my hose developed an aneurysm that ruined it.

Even though we now have a second pressure reducer to use between the hose and the spigot, I still don't like using the system. The only time we'll use it is if we top off our water tanks (200 gallons) the night before a departure, and don't want to run the water down prior to casting off. At that point we'll use shore water for showers, flushing, et cetera.