A little build project for my customer

Bobvin

Bobvin

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Jun 25, 2013
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I haven't "built" anything with my hands for a while, but an interesting opportunity came up recently...

Primarily, my company, Pure Water Systems makes point-of-use drinking water filters, but occasionally I get to bid on a project for an analytical or research lab. The standards are very high, often requiring the ultimate in water purity, what is called 18 meg water, for 18.2 megohms of resistivity; also called Type 1 water. It is the purest water possible. Next below that is "regent" grade water, at 10 megohms resistivity (type 2).

I had a customer where we were providing type 2 water, but they needed some type 1 for a new R&D division. My systems don't have the microprocessor controllers and other electronics of the Lab water leaders Millipore and Elgalabs, but we do make water to the highest standards when needed. Anyway, my customer dumps me in favor of one of the fancy Millipore systems. Then about 10 days later, they call begging me to come back. My system produces water at a much faster rate, and the fancy system couldn't meet their demands. So the fancy system is off to the R&D department, and I'm back in the production environment.

But I hated my previous install, all the parts were mounted under a cabinet, and I was always crawling around on my hands and knees in a spot too low to kneel, and too high to lay on my back and reach things. Awkward. So I decided to put everything on a little stand, to build it as an prototype in wood, and I may come back to rebuild it in aluminum.

The system includes a pre-filter setup with a sediment filter, two columns of carbon filtration, a booster pump, and twin RO elements. It can crank out 125 gallons per day. The water then flows through a Deionization tank using ultra-pure resins, and into a pair of 14 gallon holding tanks. From the holding tanks it passes through a delivery pump, a large Ultra-Violet lamp, two more mixed-bed deionization tanks, and finally a .2 micron filter to ensure we have removed all particulates and any carcasses of dead microbes, cyst, or virus. There is also a probe to measure instantaneous resistivity.

A couple days working with my hands, just some good old fashion wood work. I know many people are much more skilled, or have a shop. This was in my garage, with a skill-saw, drill, and sand-paper. The loss of my garage contents back when we moved down to Portland left me without a square or workbench, or even a straight-edge. Forgive my photography, I can't seem to hold an iPhone still.

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Very soon I will be a Bob's client
Bottle Water in DR are very expensive
And I Like the best and Pure Water Sys are the best !!!!

:)
 
Thanks for the kind words fellas, appreciated.
 
nice bob!!! so i was in south missouri in lake of the ozarks for a couple years. the water there was softened but awful. i spent the entire time filling up water barrels out of a simple r/o system. and there was so much waste water that i actually ran the tube out to the lake because a clog in the drain would have been house ruining.lol. do your filters produce alot of waste the same way an r/o does? i had a zero ppm system and the water tasted great. just curious.
 
Petro85 said:
nice bob!!! so i was in south missouri in lake of the ozarks for a couple years. the water there was softened but awful. i spent the entire time filling up water barrels out of a simple r/o system. and there was so much waste water that i actually ran the tube out to the lake because a clog in the drain would have been house ruining.lol. do your filters produce alot of waste the same way an r/o does? i had a zero ppm system and the water tasted great. just curious.
Click to expand...

Reverse Osmosis, as a process, uses water pressure to purify water, but the contaminants will build up at a microscopic level at the surface of the membrane, so there must be some flow to carry away the concentrated contaminants or plaque will form—fouling the membrane. (In this case, anything not H2O is considered a contaminant, so all mineral salts are included, not just dangerous or toxic contaminants.) We all use water this way all the time, to wash our clothes, our bodies, our cars, etc. I call it "working water". That said, poorly designed RO can dump up to 10 gallons to the drain for every pure gallon produced. That I consider wasteful, and is a result of poor design. Our systems generally harvest about 30% of the total water stream, so much less brine water is produced. In general, to get this level of purity, this is extremely cost effective vs. the only other real method to achieve this level of purity which is distillation. The cost of electricity for distillation is far more than the cost of water.

I am curious however of your comment regarding the water in Lake of Ozarks area. If quite hard, even softened, RO alone won't usually get you to zero ppm, as the best RO (like ours) is about 97% effective. In our systems we add de-ionization after the RO has done the heavy lifting, this gets rid of 97% of the 3% remaining after RO. It is not uncommon for our systems to get to zero ppm even starting with water containing up to 2000 ppm TDS.

So while we do use some water to make pure water, at least the water we reject has gone through some carbon purification. While the TDS of the brine is higher than the incoming tap water, at least we've removed a great deal of any organic contaminants like pesticides, herbicides, industrial solvents, etc.
 
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