A flood of costs and a trickle of cash

Andy Pag attempts to rebuild a Spectra watermaker on a budget

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Maybe I should have listened to the voice telling me to walk away, but I needed a watermaker after my Osmosea unit died and here was a Spectra unit, supposedly the Rolls Royce of watermakers, being advertised at a fair price.

Whenever the owner of something that's not working tells you how easy it is to fix, ask yourself why they haven't done so themselves. It'd been left in a heap for a few months and who knows how many bits of it had stopped working in the meantime. "You'll probably find it just needs a bit of a clean" the seller chirped as I handed over the cash against my internal screams to turn and walk away.

The thing that sold it though was that I'd read Spectra sell a rebuild kit with all the internal parts that effectively make the unit like new. Later that evening I learned these kits retail at over £1,000, for a handful of proprietary parts and a lot of imperial-sized O-rings - not an option for me. So the challenge began to see how cheaply I could get fresh water out of this thing.

The unit is essentially in four parts: the 12V pump, the pressure intensifier (also known as a Clark Pump), the membrane, and the electronics.