H a b i b i S a i l s: Project: Fuel polish

Those of you who know Marco personally most probably are aware that he likes to research a lot - mostly about boats at the moment of course ;-) He is regularly checking forums and technical sites in the web to inquire and is reading in the books we brought over. When we bought Habibi we still lived thousands of miles apart and we couldn't do work on the boat ourselves. So Marco spent most of his free time reading and learning about maintaining a boat - I didn't always like it back then... but I'm even more happy he did today! It gives him the ability to fix problems or improve a system on his own. Imagine we'd to call a "specialist" every time we're facing a problem!

For quite some time he had this idea of assembling a "fuel polish system". He explained it to me but to be honest - I couldn't really picture it. He ordered the parts: a filter, a pump, a switch and some rubber pipe. I still didn't see how that would work. He needed a box and our friend built one according to the instructions given. NOW I understood!
It's actually simple once you've seen it. And brilliant. We can use it either to filter diesel before it goes into our tank (you suck it out of a jerry can, it goes through the filter and then into the tank) or we can use it to clean the diesel that's already in our tank. On the sucking end there is a long copper pipe mounted that allows to reach till the bottom - that's where the residues are hidden.
OK you might ask yourself now why all this hassle, money and waste of storage place? First, you don't want to clog your engine because of dirty fuel. This usually doesn't happen in a quiet anchorage but in high seas while drifting onto some cliffs! Second, to prevent that you can hire "specialists" who come to your boat with their fuel polish equipment (usually it's old, dirty, worn out and incomplete) and ask a lot of money for it.
So Marco thought it is good invested money as we could even use the filter as a spare for the engine. I think my husband is a genius!