Aft balconies and SOOT

[JerseyGirl1959]

Sadly, it's a thing!

Maybe not on all sailings, but on ours in July to the Greek Isles.

Some days were worse than others. We were walking most mornings and saw residue every day. Not only on our balcony but on the rear of the ship as well.

Never leave your clothes out there to dry without checking first and leaving a towel in between air and lounger.

It seemed worse overnight/early morning ?

We worked around it by going to the upper levels and/or by standing only on our balcony. Thankfully it was a 4 of 7 day excursion week for us so it was less impactful.

Still sad though.

[njkruzer]

Which ship?

[kochleffel]

There have been threads about this before. In short, which is all I can remember, maintenance is done on the engines at night and soot may be blown out. Ideally this would take place while the ship is crosswise to the wind, so that it would blow over the side, but sometimes that isn't possible.

 

 

Radiance-class ships are powered by gas instead of diesel, so it ought to be less of an issue on them. Anyway, it doesn't indicate a problem with the ship, only with the wind direction.

[Thorben-Hendrik]

That was our experince too! It does seem to happen quite often!:rolleyes:

[Crism]

We had a beautiful crossing on Jewel back in May with no soot in sight, but the evening we left Gibraltar I watched it POUR down soot onto the entire aft part of the ship. The aft lounge's windows on deck 5 were COVERED as well as our aft balcony. We had a day at sea the following day so nothing was cleaned other than our balconies during the day. The stateroom attendants were NOT happy about the extra work! Once we made it to Valencia, the ship was cleaned off...only to have it happen AGAIN about a day later.

 

Stateroom attendant spoke with a friend in engineering, and word of mouth said that it was the type of gas we took on in Gibraltar. Evidently the changeover from San Juan gas to European gas causes some issues with the GTV ships.

[JerseyGirl1959]

Which ship?

It was Jewel. I am not here to complain but to inform. I’m sure it doesn’t happen on every cruise

[chengkp75]

There have been threads about this before. In short, which is all I can remember, maintenance is done on the engines at night and soot may be blown out. Ideally this would take place while the ship is crosswise to the wind, so that it would blow over the side, but sometimes that isn't possible.

 

 

Radiance-class ships are powered by gas instead of diesel, so it ought to be less of an issue on them. Anyway, it doesn't indicate a problem with the ship, only with the wind direction.

 

While it is true that the Radiance class ships use "gas turbines" for power, the fuel is not "gas". The ships burn diesel fuel in their gas turbines, which while cleaner than the residual fuel burned in the diesel engines of other ships, will also have sooting problems, and the ship also has boilers and even burning diesel fuel there will be soot formation here as well.

[ONECRUISER]

Never had Soot on Radiance Class ships... Voyager Class little but that was 20yrs ago...