When we first moved aboard Camille, we added a freshwater foot-pump to our galley sink so we would have a backup if our pressure waterpump failed. The foot-pump also helps us conserve water and electricity while at anchor. But we haven’t used it much. A cardinal rule of living aboard is that everything needs to serve at least two functions, so our foot-pump needed to become more useful.

What we needed was good drinking water, and while our watermaker makes excellent, very drinkable water, we are a bit leery of our water tank. In the marina we use water from the dock to refill our tank and buy gallon jugs of drinking water. At anchor we refill the gallon jugs straight from the watermaker. The jugs take up a lot of space on the boat and are creating way too much waste!

We decided to use the faucet attached to the foot-pump for drinking water by adding a carbon filter. Carbon filters are quite large and I wasn’t really happy about losing space under the sink. (I’m sure by now you have seen the area under our sink….) After buying a new filter we noticed it looked a lot like a filter we already had on board: The filter we use to back-flush our watermaker. Boat-brain! Good thing we were able to return it.

We also wanted a way to be able to pump saltwater into the galley sink in case we really needed to save freshwater – washing the dishes takes up a big chunk of our freshwater supply. So Mike connected the foot-pump line to the raw intake for the watermaker with a tee connector. Check out the video to see just how he did this.