Apologies to all German readers straight off the bat. My love of Blackadder Goes Forth has ruined any chance of me ever speaking German without sniggering and "Tuten Panzer" (lit. "poop tank") is most definitely a bastardisation, if a slightly amusing one to my 8 year old sense of humour.

The good news is that the Tuten-Panzer has arrived safe and sound through customs without a hitch. Under UK Tax law, certain ships of a given size and displacement are called "qualifying ships" and for items which are part of the infrastructure of the ship, they qualify for Zero Rating for VAT. In short we saved about £700 just by knowing the rules. Our portholes (all 16 of them so far amounting to about £2800 ish are zero rated for VAT as well) which is a fair sized saving.

Anywho, onto the Tuten-Panzer. I used a freight forwarder in the USA to ship the pallet over in a container which cost me about $275. Bargain I thought. A little bit of communication buffoonery followed with emails going missing and me eventually having to ring them up and ask what the hell was going on, but after prodding and growling at them everything was sorted.

What wasn't made abundantly clear was that there would be charges at the other end associated with the freight forwarder's UK counterpart. The container wouldn't just be offloaded into a bonded warehouse of some description in Southampton where I could roll up, pay the taxes and poke off with Tuten-Panzer on board. Naive? Possibly, but at least I know the score now. The container is offloaded and sent to the UK version of the freight forwarder, Essex in our case. You have to pay the import taxes (and VAT if appropriate), pay for the use of their deferment account (as an individual you probably won't have one with HMRC) and their fee (variable). All told about £270ish. You would have to pay these anyway and shipping costs direct were far more expensive so it worked out pretty economically.

For those interested, the Type 2 Marine Sanitation Device breaks down waste in 3 separate chambers:

Aeration - A continual supply of air bubbles through the soup and keeps the sewage mixing with the bacteria and in a state of areobic decomposition.
Clarification - Liquid displaced from the aeration chamber flows into this chamber and any sludge is recycled back into the previous chamber.
Chlorination - the original plan was to have the displaced water flow over the Sodium Hypochlorite tablets which would have been sourced here (swimming pool stuff) but this is not suitable and they cannot send them by freight as they are deemed hazardous cargo. Hence we have had to go for the drip chlorinator system at an extra cost of $895.

The version we have can treat up to 56 gallons of waste per day which is more than enough for full occupation of the barge and can use drinking, brackish or salt water for flushing. This is an important consideration so that wherever we are, be it river, estuary or sea, we can use free water to flush our toilets rather than having to use drinking water which may have been produced from our Reverse Osmosis unit (an expensive way to flush the toilet!).

The drip chlorinator has a dial for the rate of release of the liquid sodium hypochlorite which will need to be set according to the through flow and will need monitoring closely to ensure the minimum free chlorine left in the discharge which will be vented overboard. Time and close testing will reveal the right settings with time and occupation. We have also purchased enough biological accelerator and odour control/bio enhancer to last a couple of years.

Regarding the rules and regs for discharge at sea, MARPOL Annex IV is the bible but you need to be 400gt or 15 persons so the regs won't apply to us as we sneak under the regs. Having checked with a Marine Surveyor from the MCA, I think we are fitting pretty much best in class and will free us from the need to call into port to offload sewage. It also means we won't be pumping raw sewage into estuaries or seas which from an ecological perspective makes me a happy bunny.

For those interested, The Barge Association has a good section on Qualifying Ships and VAT, or see HMRC Brief 38/09 and Notice 744C for further... Zzzzzzzzzzzzz.....