Today’s journey takes us under the floorboards, because the water tanks for our boat are built into the keels. There are six sealed holes like this, three on each side, with a little over fifty gallons of fiberglass tank underneath them.
Apparently the thing to do to sanitize your water tanks is to fill them with very-diluted bleach, run the solution through all the hoses, and let it sit for a while. I decided it would probably be best to go a little further, so I got a brand new scrub brush and went to town. In retrospect, it would probably have been better to have done this before filling the tanks quite so far, to get less bleach on my arms.
After filling, but before cleaning, the tanks looked nice and clear, though with some junk floating around inside. You can see some of the shape of the hull here, too.
After the scrubbing phase, you can see we’ve dislodged quite a bit of what I hope is just deposited minerals. Then I brought out the heavy guns, by which I mean this ultrasonic cleaner. (I found out about this thing because Sonic Soak decided I was into cleaning gadgets and spammed me with ads, and then I found out that they’re essentially re-marketing a transducer from AliBaba.) Here it is doing its magic:
And after it finished:
… actually doesn’t look that much cloudier, vs. the scrubbing version. Verdict: unclear.
The next phase is to drain all this beautiful bleach-infused water, and since I had cleaning solution essentially on draft, I decided it was a good time to clean out the shower-bilge as well. I didn’t take pictures of that (you’re welcome), but along the way I did take this gem of a photo:
Just so much going on here, from the corroded valve to the sketchy strainer, which proved unequal to the task at hand… but that’s a story for another post.