Water Maker Prefilter glogged after 1week?

[SV THIRD DAY]

Originally Posted by BambooSailor

Probably stupid question, but I've seen them installed incorrectly: 20 micron is first, followed by 5 micron, not the other way around?

Correct.
The approach is to have progressive filtration to both extend the filter life and minimize the pressure drop.

[BambooSailor]

Rich, I know you know, question was more for OP

[tanglewood]

Originally Posted by Tellie

Unless you really are in some very high concentrations of bloom it may be more an issue of the pressure sensors either failing or that they need to be re- calibrated.

www.HaldenMarineService.com

Hi Tellie,

Every time I've chased this down the final conclusion has been that the filters are doing their job and there must be a lot of "stuff" in the water. I've been through the pressure calibration process, and you can see the pressure slowly drop over the course of running the system. And in the end, the filters look visibly skanked up. Fresh filters brings the pressure right back up and the process starts again. Cleaning our filters allows them to be successfully reused multiple times. So as best I can tell, as best Spectra can tell, and as best anyone else I've talked to can tell, the filters are just doing their job, but doing it very quickly.

But I admit to still being very puzzled by this. I've cruised from Nova Scotia to the Bahamas and experienced this. Yes, the filters lasted longer in the Bahamas than in Nova Scotia, but still no more than 6 or maybe 8 hrs of run time. And I always run out in open water, not in harbors, not in the ICW, not in Long Island Sound, etc.

Now I'm on the west coast in a different boat and different water maker (though still Spectra) and I'm seeing the same thing. I've run from So Cal all the way up to Seattle with pretty much the same results.

So I get 4 to maybe 8 hrs of run time, where everyone else I talk to gets weeks to months out of a set of filters. Do the worlds algae blooms follow me around the planet? I kinda doubt it.

Could I be doing something wrong? Maybe, but how does turning it on and off cause this?

Anyway, I remain very puzzled, but just finished installing a media filter which I think is the sledge-hammer solution to the problem. I'll be real interested to see how it works when I exercise it over the next couple of weeks. I'll need to reset the clean filter pressure point again, but that's no biggie.