why do large boats have spouts near water level that continuously dump out water?
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Large boats and ships have a whole lot of systems that use water. It could be any of those systems, although some of the systems that use really large amounts of water aren’t going to have a discharge visible above the waterline (thinking things like variable ballast) some of the systems have to be above the waterline for service connections to take over when the ship is moored (thinking things like sanitary connections) and some are almost always going to discharge into the water because the volume is small and the use is infrequent when moored like engine cooling water. Fresh water usually isn’t discharged directly overboard not for environmental reasons, but because there’s usually not a need to discharge it overboard. You run the freshwater plant (still, RO, whatever) until you’ve filled the tanks that store the water they produce, then you shut the plant down until the level gets down to wherever they’ve decided it’s time to run the plant again. The flushing water from the other side is discharged overboard but the amount of bad stuff leftover from purifying the seawater being added to the ocean in various places as the ship or boat moves along is course is relatively miniscule. There are certain things you can’t discharge overboard although I wouldn’t say they’re never discharged but there are big fines if anyone is discovered pumping something like waste oil overboard
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