bornonthetide t1_iuav6bc wrote
As a marine engineer we do this type stuff, it's not as bad as people are saying. Break down every 5-10 years. Plumbers feel this way because they only show up and fix the broken ones, I see them work year after year only needing occasional repair.
Dumb question but is a vacuume toilet out of the question? Those work really well for a long time.
Impressive_Health134 t1_iubuhub wrote
I have a dumb question for you. Isn’t shit and piss just dumped into the ocean? Or is it stored and removed when ships dock? Seems your post indicates the latter which I find surprising for some reason.
bornonthetide t1_iuc0mxa wrote
Yea, we have a lot of rules, man. Like if every boat did this in a port, it would be really unsanitary, so there's rules about when and where you can pump, but it all goes into one of three types of holding tanks, then pumped based on where we are, gray water can't even go overboard in Port because of detergents and soaps. In fact a type 1 marine sanitation device (also known as an MSD) with vacuum lines, the same overboarding centrifugal pump used to overboard, has valving and guages that run the poo water through whats known as an educator to build vacuum, we keep cigars on board just for finding vacuum leaks.
Marine engineers are a strange trive because of limited people on the boat, we have to be plumbers, electricians with power generation knowlage, diesel plants, boilers and in order to be competent were HEAVLY trained. I'm sure I'm just tooting my own horn but I like to think of us as maybe special forces of the trades, licensed in all and when we're not on the boat, we're always training, electronics? Networks.
It's dangerous to go deep sea and not have spare parts and rigorously trained engineers.
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