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Removed the long drain tube and found free moisture in the foam. Not dripping, but wet to the touch. I've been running the blower for a while now with it blowing into the inside hole - the air is about 100F and I'm getting a high velocity air stream out the transom hole. Good conditions for the diffusion of the moisture into the air stream. The foam is now totally dry to the touch. The technique seems to work quite well. I'll keep running the blower to further dry the foam because it will be very effective in scavenging moisture. As I said earlier- it's virtually impossible to quantify the results but it does well qualitatively.
An effective way to quantitatively know the result is to weigh your boat before and after some length of time. We know the weight of water and truck scales are quite accurate.
May I suggest, in the interest of saving energy, that you turn off the blower for a couple of days and check for wetness. If the area is wet resume the treatment until it is dry again, repeat until no moisture shows at the drain area foam. You will then know that you have dried your foam as much as possible without using more electrical energy than needed.
I found quite a bit of water seeping from the corroded thru hulls of the 18 Outrage I am restoring.
I Used a number of approaches to dry the hull.
Since I am completely restoring this boat everything was removed, all screws, hardware, floor, gas tank... everything.
Then I weighted the boat to determine as I proceeded if indeed I was making progress.
I have access to an industrial air compressor system with an air dryer which removes the moisture from the air down to a -40 degree dewpoint (a very low RH or very very dry air). I sealed the boat with plastic and introduced the dry air (regulated to 2 psi) thru one of the thru hulls and allowed the interior to dry over a week to ten days. During this process I added a small heater in the interior to keep the air warm. So effectively the interior of the boat, all open screw holes (and there were lots of them) and the thru hull fitting were bathed in dry air. I do have to admit that while this approach seemed great, it only dried the surfaces.
Next I reamed out the foam from around all of the thru hulls. This I did to remove the foam which was most saturated and to provide space to seal these opening independent of the metal sleeve to be installed later. I then rigged a plug on one side of the thru hull and a second plug on the other side with a 1/4" poly tubing coming out of it. With a little silicone this sealed the interior of the thru hull and created a chamber into the foam layer between the hull and the interior FG. I applied a vacuum to the poly line and installed a "knock-out" bottle between the plug and the vacuum pump. This worked well and while I did not measure the water that came out, I did measure the differential weight which was 40#. That's 8 gallons.
I then centered a teflon rod thru the thru hull opening and injected heavy epoxy into the voids created by the removal of the foam. This created a complete seal of the thru hull openings and the metal sleeve will be added in order to keep the boat original.
Was it worth it? Well it does give me peace of mind that I'm working with likely the driest hull I can have and it won't happen again.
