The name of the original business asks YWorry? But the owners of YWorry Marine Services also seem to operate on the “why not?” principle. Not long ago, Tom and Sue Tiller asked themselves: Why not use boat watermakers to create fresh water from salt water for island houses?
Not surprisingly, they already had the answer. Next spring, they will install in a Great Duck Island house a system Tom designed using the same reverse-osmosis technology employed on the high-end yachts they now service at the dock beside their Southport Island home.
Several other Maine companies, including Great Water, Inc., of Brunswick and Air and Water Quality, Inc., of Windham, also market reverse-osmosis systems for islands and other places where fresh water is scarce.
For years, the Tillers have worked with the watermaking systems aboard the boats they maintain for owners from around the world. Their clients come from all over, including Cincinnati, Vero Beach, Florida; Nashville, San Francisco and Singapore.
Tom and Sue say the new company, Advanced Water Options, will be a division of YWorry Marine Services. Then Sue laughs. “Here we are at corporate headquarters,” she said, standing on the porch of their waterside home, three yachts awaiting repairs at the dock behind them.
In 1989, Sue started YWorry in Castine, after giving up her position as sailing master at Maine Maritime Academy, her alma mater. Tom, a longtime boat captain, also has an engineering degree from the University of Maine in Orono. They have operated the business out of their home in Southport for six years.
Their interest in the systems was piqued because their own home has town water only in the summer and they know their well, their winter source of water, may not hold up for too long. They may soon be installing a system of their own.
“This technology is not brand new,” said Tom. “I first ran into it around 1975 and it had been around a while, although it was fairly new then.”
In recent years, Mike Bowden, the president of Ocean Options in Tiverton, Rhode Island, has urged the Tillers to consider installing the systems in Maine island homes, as he has in several homes in southern New England. Ocean Options is the local distributor for the reverse-osmosis desalinators the Tillers will use, systems that are manufactured by Sea Recovery of Gardena, California.
“The manufacturer has installed lots of these system in land-based situations, in the Caribbean especially. You see more of them the farther south you go,” said Bowden. “We’ve done some down here, though, and they’ve been very successful.”
One of the biggest problems in southern New England, said Bowden, “is getting past the towns and the state. But they’re starting to work with us a lot more.” Bowden recalls a conference telephone call with the owner of GAP and a bevy of lawyers. During Bowden’s lengthy explanation of the technicalities, the caller interrupted him to ask, “Can you give me water or not?”
“Yes,” replied Bowden. “If I can get to the salt water, I can get you fresh water. But I can’t tell you at what cost.” Cost was not an issue, and that’s the only barrier, said Bowden.
“If you can afford a big house on the water, often banks aren’t involved. Often we are called after the fact when people realize they have a water problem.”
“We’ve encouraged Tom and Sue because we’ve been approached many times and because we’re so busy with marine stuff, we haven’t been able to react as quickly as we should,” said Bowden.” I think it will be a big market for them. It’s the future.”
“Mike has been very supportive,” said Tom. “If we need help with the design work, they’ll provide it. They’ll answer questions. We can draw on their experience, but if they don’t have the answers they will call Sea Recovery.”
Finally, the Tillers decided to take the plunge. Their first clients are two psychologists from Massachusetts who have been building their island summer home for 17 years. Although Tom has not finished the design completely yet, he figures they will end up with a unit that’s rated to deliver 600 gallons of fresh water a day.
“That’s deceptive, because the rating is based on 24 hours a day,” Tom explained. “It’s preferable to run them about six hours a day, so that means really producing around 150 gallons a day.”
The homeowners should still be thrilled. They have been carrying water to their summer home for years, using only an average of 70 gallons a week.
Water of the future?
Some regions, especially hot and dry countries such as the Arab nations, are dependent on huge desalinization plants as their major source of fresh water, especially for urban areas.
“Tampa, Florida, makes a lot of water,” said Tom. “Some islands in the Bahamas rely almost exclusively on desalinization for fresh water.”
Droughts around the world are forcing countries to look again at the technology. Israel is considering accelerated construction of several plants to solve a rapidly deteriorating drought condition. A few other Florida communities are considering desalinization, as are several other states including California and Hawaii.
Turning salt water into fresh water employs one of two techniques – boiling the water and capturing the freshwater steam, or increasingly, as the technology becomes less expensive, reverse osmosis. Although the cost of large-scale reverse osmosis technology is dropping, large plants still require huge amounts of expensive energy to power the process, so countries and municipalities usually situate large desalinization plants near power plants.
The principle is simple. Take salt water, push it through a cylinder filled with filters that screen the tiny salt molecules out and allow only the fresh water through. Voila! Fresh water.
As with most principles, the execution is a little more complicated. “A water maker pushes salt water through a membrane, a tight filter,” explained Tom. Typical smaller systems use between 600 pounds and 1,000 pounds of pressure to push the water through. Salt and other molecules stay behind and only clean, fresh water penetrates the membrane.
A salt-water molecule is smaller than a molecule of oil, or decomposed matter, Sue explained. Therefore, if salt is retained by the filtering membrane, so are impurities. “So if you keep out the salt water molecules, you get really clean water,” Sue said.
The tube the water is pushed through has a smaller tube in the center where fresh water is collected after the filters do their work. Several layers of membrane are separated spiral-fashion by another material “like a jelly roll,” said Tom, that directs the fresh water to the center.
“There’s a 90 percent rejection,” he added. “Only ten gallons out of 100 become fresh water. The rejected water carries all the crap out.” Before water reaches the membrane, there’s a pre-filtering system that takes away anything larger than five microns, so only the smaller particles make it to the membrane filter. “It’s pretty nuts-and-bolts stuff,” said Tom. “The only sophisticated part is the membrane itself.” One pump pushes the water through the filter, then a high-speed pump, “like a pressure washer” pushes salt water out one side and fresh water out the other side.
Solving individual problems
The machine is not the issue in land-based situations, it’s reaching the ocean water. Unlike boats, houses that might effectively use the systems don’t all sit on the water or its edge.
“It’s different for year-round or summer applications. It can be as simple as a pipe on the beach, or drilling a salt water well on the beach – which also helps to pre-filter the water. You can spend a lot of money, from around $15,000 to $150,000 or more,” said Tom.
Even for smaller systems that provide fresh water to a single house, energy costs are significant, but the Tillers say that situation is improving. The Great Duck Island project will require a generator. Systems can be noisy as well, but smaller ones are quieter, and the newer ones are less noisy.
“The new line for Sea Recovery is the Ultra Whisper. It uses less energy and it’s quieter,” said Tom. “It uses a gadget called a ‘hydraulic multiplier’ instead of a high-pressure pump.” The Ultra Whisper line of smaller machines are rated for 200, 400 or 600 gallons a day.
“What we’re offering to do is design and install the water-making systems, then maintain them,” said Tom. “We’ll be there to stand behind the product and the installation down the road.”
“We enjoy our work. We have wonderful customers,” said Sue. Their business handles six to eight boats at one time, worth a total of around $3.3 million. “It will be different dealing with houses. But maybe we can have the same strong personal connections with the house people as we do with the boat people.”
“We’re at the point that we’ve been in the moving and maintaining business for so long, that now we’re the ‘experts.’ We’ve seen everything before,” added Tom. “But everyone in the business now looks so much younger. We don’t know how long we can keep it up, so we’re branching out.”