A friend was heading to the Miami boat show earlier this year, and asked if we’d like him to look for anything on our behalf. I said, “sure! Please see what you can find for a good deal on an efficient water maker”. So, he shopped around a bit and gave us some contact info for the Schenker Zen, sold out of a distributor in Ft. Lauderdale, Fl.

Foremost after deciding it was the right unit for our needs, we had to find a location to install it. A guy at our marina said we should give up our quarter berth (or get a bigger boat). No way! So, after lengthy deliberation between Kelly and me, we decided to remove the port-side water tank, thereby opening up a huge amount of space under the settee.

We gave up about 35 gallons of storage capacity, but opened up a lot of space – not only for the new water maker, but a spot to put the inverter, as well as other very useful storage space.

After a few days of work, many feet of hose, (and the requisite number of swear words), we had our new water maker installed! Now we just need to have our boat in the water to see if it works. We’ll comment in a later post about how this works.