Simple Reverse Osmosis Units with Lots of Options

After many years of selling our famous (to us, at least) Black and White reverse osmosis units, we’ve decided to change the way we present them. The core product will be the same tough, simple unit, but our website presentation will soon allow customers to build their own RO unit by choosing from among three basic designs then adding features. The simple three-stage unit, the core product, which has been by far the most popular style over the years, will actually go down in price, but some of the add-on options that we’ve been giving phone customers will be added for selection on the website at a modest increase in price.

We’re now going to build the basic units in 3 formats only.  You can see them in the pictures below.

By far the most popular style is the simple three-stage unit consisting of a carbon block prefilter, the RO membrane, and a carbon block postfilter.

Three Stage Black and White RO Unit

This most basic undersink RO unit, the “three stage,” has a prefilter (vertical canister on the left in the picture), an RO membrane (the horizontal canister), and a postfilter (right vertical canister).  “Pre” means that the filter comes before the membrane, and “post” means that it comes after. The prefilter is normally a carbon block filter, since it has to protect the membrane from chlorine or chloramine in city water. (On unchlorinated well water, a simple sediment filter may be used.)

The basic three stage unit shown above has all the essentials that make undersink RO units such excellent performers: two top quality carbon filters to remove disinfectants and chemical contaminants and an RO membrane to deal with the hard-to-remove contaminants that carbon doesn’t handle, like lead, arsenic, nitrates, and fluoride. The  membrane also reduces the dissolved solids (called TDS, for total dissolved solids) by about 95%. (All Black and White units come with a hand-held TDS tester so that membrane performance can be verified.)

Most standard “4-stage” RO units on the market use two full-sized filters plus a small refrigerator filter clipped to the membrane as the final carbon stage.  Black and White  4-stage units, by contrast, use three full-sized filters plus the membrane.  In all Black and White units, prefilters are housed in black vessels and postfilters are in white housings.  The unit pictured below has two prefilters (black) and a single postfilter (white).

Black and White 4-Stage with Two Pre-Filters

Having two prefilters allows a variety of cartridge choices. Here are some prefilter cartridges that might be added as the first or second prefilter  element:

• A sediment filter.
• An additional carbon block filter.
• A scale prevention cartridges to protect the membrane from scaling.
• A KDF55 stage to enhance chlorine removal and inhibit growth of bacteria within the unit.
• An iron filter to protect the membrane from iron or manganese.
• An oxidizing prefilter to enhance arsenic reduction.
• A KDF85 stage for pretreatment of smelly well water.

Black and White 4 Stage with Two Post-Filters

With two postfilters, here are some popular choices for the extra postfilter stage:

• An extra carbon block filter.
• A ceramic or other extremely tight filter to assure bacteria-free water.
• A pH/alkalinity increaser.
• A cation (softener resin) cartridge to remove ammonia.
• A deionizing (DI) cartridge to remove ammonia and reduce all dissolved solids to zero.

All Black and White units built in the three basic styles above come with cartridges of your choice.  The price of the unit is the same regardless of the cartridges selected.

Add-ons and Upgrades

This Calcite/Coconut shell inline filter that gives a mild increase to pH and TDS is a popular postfilter add-on.

Black and White units are now built only in the three basic formats shown.  Any additional components are viewed as add-ons, not additional “stages” to the RO unit. Popular add-ons are inline sediment or carbon filters, ceramic filters, calcite filters, and scale reducers. Add-ons of this type usually come with their own mounting bracket for placement near the main unit.

The standard faucet for Black and White units is the top quality conventional chrome Tomplinson ProFlo. It comes as standard equipment with the RO unit.  There is an extra charge for upgrading to Tomlinson Designer and Contemporary faucets that are offered in a variety of finishes as options. Other Tomlinson models are available by special order.

Performance upgrades are offered at a modest upcharge. These are all features that  require a special rebuild of the basic units.  They include:

• Adding a performance boosting permeate pump to the unit.
• Substituting a water saving Pentek encapsulated membrane for the standard Filmtec membrane.
• Furnishing the unit with 3/8″ tubing from the storage tank to the faucet to enhance flow to faucet and refrigerators.
• Including a kit to connect the RO unit to a refrigerator or other remote point of use.

Added equipment, of course, can be included for the price of the equipment itself:

• Adding an extra storage tank or a larger capacity storage tank.
• Adding a “demand pump” setup to deliver RO water to a remote location.
• Adding a “booster pump” to increase pressure coming into the RO unit.
• Adding a a small ultraviolet unit either before or after the RO unit.

Watch for these changes on our Black and White reverse osmosis page, coming soon.

Removing Nitrates at Point of Entry with Anion Exchange Resin

As nitrate contamination of US wells, including those used for city water supplies, becomes more common,  the need for nitrate treatment is becoming more urgent.  The acceptable limit for nitrates is 10 mg/L and this limit is being exceeded with greater frequency because of excessive fertilizer use and contamination from animal farms and feedlots.

Removing nitrates from drinking water is fairly simple, with reverse osmosis being a proven performer with nitrates. Distillation is also very effective with nitrates.

For point of entry applications, however, the price of equipment and operation goes up sharply, with the main strategy being anion exchange. An anion exchanger works a lot like a water softener, but it costs more to purchase and operate.  In addition, there are some pitfalls to avoid.

Here’s some advice from a Penn State University publication:

Once a water supply becomes contaminated with nitrate, it is costly to treat. While treatment to meet drinking water needs is practical, treatment of larger quantities like livestock supplies is costly. Ion exchange units, reverse osmosis, or distillation all remove nitrate from drinking water. Note that boiling water does not remove nitrates and is not a treatment alternative. In fact, it increases nitrate concentrations as water evaporates.

An ion exchange unit operates much like a household water softener. A softener filters calcium and magnesium laden water through a resin coated with sodium ions. As water flows through the unit, the resin releases its sodium ions and readily trades them for the calcium and magnesium. For nitrate removal, the resin exchanges chloride ions for nitrate and sulfate ions in the water. After treating many gallons of water, the resin will “run out” of chloride. Regenerating the resin with a concentrated solution of sodium chloride (you can use bicarbonate instead of chloride) recharges it for further treatment.

Ion exchange does have drawbacks. Because the resin prefers to absorb sulfate, water high in sulfates hinders the nitrate exchange and reduces system effectiveness. If the resin becomes saturated, it releases the nitrates in place of sulfates, resulting in an increased nitrate concentration in the “treated” water. Also, nitrate ion exchange can make the water corrosive. Neutralizing the water after it leaves the unit reduces this effect. Finally, ion exchange can be expensive and requires maintenance. Since the backwash brine will be high in nitrates, care must be given to its disposal.

Source:  Penn State Extension.

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

Gazette’s Famous Water Pictures Series:  The Bendsura Project

The Bendsura Project is now empty. The white line on the dam wall 20 feet up marks the old water line when the reservoir was flush with water just a few years back.

The picture above shows the severity of drought in the Indian state of Maharashtra.

After several years of drought the reservoir that once supplied water to the entire nearby city of Beed is now empty. Half of this western state — 28,000 villages — is battling a severe water shortage.

The reservoir project dates to 1955 when the reservoir was constructed on the small Bindusara (a.k.a. Bendsura) River.

Below is what the Bendsura Project looked like at one time:

The New Date for National Garden Hose Day Is June 22

Be advised that National Garden Hose Day, which has been celebrated on August 3 since its inception, has been moved to June 22.  Although event officals did not give a reason for the change, many suspect that it was occasioned by a marked decline in interest for the holiday last year. In fact, one of the event’s coordinators, who wishes to remain anonymous, said that there has always been some concern about the late-summer date.  “By August,” he said, “people are tired of their lawns, tired of their gardens, and tired of garden hoses. It just makes sense to move the date up a bit.”

Watch the Gazette for complete Garden Hose Day coverage in weeks to come.

More about National Garden Hose Day.

PH Paranoia: Understanding Alkaline Water Claims

The unique properties of mineral free, ultra-pure drinking water actually makes pH measurement meaningless in the body.

by Jack Barber

It’s an all-too-common misconception that alkaline water is the key to perfect health even though claims about the health benefits, or safety, of this water are not supported by much credible evidence. Clever marketers rely on personal testimonials and pseudo-scientific studies to promote alkaline water as a powerful antioxidant that can prevent or reverse many degenerative diseases, including cancer and arthritis, boost energy levels and metabolism and slow the aging process. There is absolutely no scientific proof that any of these claims are true.

In the war of the waters, alkaline water zealots not only shamelessly promote the benefits of alkaline water but take shots at both distillation (D) and reverse osmosis (RO). They believe that drinking DRO water is actually harmful because it can be slightly acidic. The truth is the unique properties of mineral free, ultra-pure drinking waters actually make the pH measurement meaningless in the body. It is important to note that de-ionized, rain and many spring waters also have the same properties that make them acidic.

Explanation of pH and why it matters

To better understand how the body renders this debate meaningless, it is necessary to have a basic explanation of pH. The pH level is a quantitative measure of the hydrogen ions representing the acidity or alkalinity of a solution. The acidic solution has more free hydrogen ions and the alkaline solution has fewer free hydrogen ions. Any substance that lowers pH is an acid and any substance that raises it is a base. Buffers are substances that enable water to resist pH change when an acid or base is added.

The pH scale ranges from 0 to 14 with a pH of 7 being neutral. A pH less than 7 is acidic and a pH greater than 7 is alkaline. The pH scale is logarithmic so for every one unit of change in pH there is a tenfold change in ion concentration. This means a solution with a pH of 3 is 10 times more acidic than a solution with a pH of 4 and 100 times more acidic than one with a pH of 5.

The effects on the pH scale from drinking DRO water

Highly purified DRO water is neutral with a pH of 7. Since there are virtually no dissolved solids (TDS) in this water, there is nothing to influence the pH change in either the alkaline or acid direction or to act as buffers to resist change. That degree of purity makes DRO water extremely sensitive so adding the slightest amount of acid or base will easily change the pH. Even a small amount of carbon dioxide from the air will combine with DRO water to lower the pH to about 6. For the same reason, just a speck of an alkalizing substance like baking soda will immediately raise the pH of a glass to over 7. In contrast, it would require considerably more acid or base to change the pH of mineral water. The difference is the presence of buffers or dissolved solids making it resistant to change. In other words, the pH of DRO water is like a pendulum that can be moved easily with a feather compared to high mineral water that requires a mallet.

Therefore, when you drink slightly acidic DRO water, it immediately combines with the slightly acidic digestive enzymes in saliva and seconds later with very acidic digestive enzymes and gastric juices in the stomach without affecting your pH in any way. In short, the extremely sensitive DRO water pH immediately adjusts to your body rather than your body adjusting to the DRO water pH. The much stronger hydrochloric acid in the stomach with a pH of 1 is about 100,000 times more acidic than any slightly acidic DRO water with which it combines. That renders the pH of DRO water completely irrelevant.

Reasons not to drink alkaline water

According to Dr. Bob Arnot, M.D., who is a well-known author and nutritionist, in a recent Men’s Health Journalarticle, “Say no to alkaline water, it’s a scam. Your body is designed to adjust to its optimal pH balance no matter what you ingest. For instance, once alkaline water enters your stomach, your body simply pours in greater amounts of acid to neutralize it.”

Since the stomach is designed to be acidic, it must produce more acid every time you drink alkaline water to compensate for the dilution of gastric juices. In a previously healthy gut, the constant ingestion of alkalized water can create an abnormal digestive condition. Even drinking alkalized water along with meals can dilute the natural acidity of the digestive tract and interfere with digestion.

Maintaining normal stomach acidity is also necessary to protect against bacterial and viral infections. The acidic environment destroys pathogenic organisms that may be ingested in both food and water. Altering this acid environment leaves you wide open to intestinal infections. At least half of everyone over 60 suffers from some level of low stomach acid. This condition can be compounded by the consumption of alkaline water.

As a Harvard Medical School graduate, nationally known author and nutritionist Dr. Andrew Weil is eminently qualified to evaluate the health claims of alkaline water. He said, “The health claims for water ionizers and alkaline water are bogus. Save your money. You should consider the fact that alkaline water is common throughout the western states, but to my knowledge, it has not protected anyone from the diseases and disorders that occur elsewhere in the U.S.”

Nutritionist and pure water advocate Dr. A. True Ott noted, “Water that is rich in hydrogen measures 5 or 6 on the pH scale (acidic), while alkaline water is actually dehydrating. In my experimentation and research, there is a direct correlation with water purity levels and hydrogen content. Thus, one should strive to consume the purest water possible, water rich in free hydrogen ions. Why then are people often tricked into thinking that drinking water with high TDS contaminants such as ionized water is actually a wise and healthy thing to do? Science and logic scream otherwise.”

Don’t fall for the easy way out

In spite of all the warnings, most people want the best health without the sacrifices needed to achieve it safely. We all love the idea of a quick fix. What better way to correct years of poor nutrition, zero exercise and chronic dehydration than by simply drinking alkaline water? Savvy marketers prey on these consumers, selling useless products that may cause severe long-term side effects. Using nothing more than sales fiction, they have beguiled trusting consumers and created a thriving market for expensive alkalizing gizmos known as ionizers.

These popular ionizers, according to scientists, are not only medically baseless and worthless, but also possibly dangerous. Four Japanese studies have been published in peer journals and independently verified showing that alkaline water caused pathological changes in heart cell muscles and increased the risk of heart attack in laboratory animals.

Normal cells die under extremely alkaline conditions. A study published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry found that alkalosis (rising cellular pH) causes alkaline-induced cell death as a result of altering mitochondrial function. These results raise very serious doubts about the safety of alkaline water.

Dr. David Brownstein, author, international lecturer and foremost practitioner of holistic medicine, said, “I disagree with the claims made about alkaline water. The claims about the benefits of drinking alkaline are made with no supporting evidence. The best way to optimize your pH is to eat a healthy diet full of minerals and vitamins. Eating refined foods like white flour, sugar and salt promote acidity.”

The wide range of pH values needed throughout the body is exquisitely balanced, primarily through a complex system of buffering and breathing. There are, however, some simple things you can do to maintain a naturally healthy pH. Eating more fruits and vegetables, practicing deep breathing and drinking plenty of pure hydrating water will enable your body to more easily remove toxins and acid metabolic wastes.

Other factors, such as lack of exercise, emotional stress, medication, coffee, alcohol and smoking, can adversely affect the internal pH of your body over an extended period of time. Thus, improved health is not a quick-fix but a slow, cumulative process consisting of numerous lifestyle choices.

It is my sincere hope that this combination of scientific studies, expert advice and common horse sense settles the pH debate so we can all freely enjoy the pure, oxygen-rich elixir of life without any pH paranoia.

Source:  Water Technology.

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

Q

What People Call Us About

by Gene Franks, Pure Water Products

When we say phone sales at Pure Water Products, we don’t mean telemarketing or cold calling.  All phone work here is incoming. When the phone rings, we answer it and do our best to help the caller, whether he or she wants to buy something, has a complaint, needs help installing or trouble-shooting a product, or just wants information. The only people we call are people who have asked us to call them.

Phone work is the hardest and scariest part of our business, because when the phone rings it can be anyone with any kind of question or problem. People who answer the phone learn quickly that  you can’t know everything and that when you don’t know the answer to a question the best thing to do is say that you don’t know and offer to get the information and call or email back. We say “I don’t know” a lot.

Here are some examples of things we get most questions about–not in order of frequency.

• Removing chloramines from city water.
• The kinds of plastics tubing and filter housings are made of, and don’t we have any made of glass or stainless steel.
• Removing iron, manganese, and/or hydrogen sulfide from well water.
• Removing fluoride and arsenic from water.
• Removing the newer contaminants like GenX.
• Adding minerals to reverse osmosis water.
• What are reverse osmosis tanks made of.
• Something the caller just heard on the news.
• Raising pH of well water and or reverse osmosis water.
• Salt-free “softeners.”
• Spot-free car washing (my own least favorite topic).
• Sizing everything: whole house city water filters, iron filters, water softeners, retention tanks, and a lot more.
• Troubleshooting undersink reverse osmosis. Most frequent question: Why isn’t my RO unit making enough water? And, how often should I change the membrane?
• Pressure drop questions about whole house filters.
• Country of origin of products. (There is much interest now in “made in USA” products, and they’re getting harder and harder to find. “Assembled in USA” is often offered as a substitute.)
• Help in identifying and buying replacement parts.

No, sir, I haven’t seen the video that proves that you can’t live past age 37 without a machine that makes alkaline water. Could you send me a link?

We’re proud that we answer the phone six days a week during Texas business hours and usually a couple of hours after. If you’ve tried calling other internet water treatment sources you know that we’re the exception to the usual. And people also tell us that we’re exceptional in that you can get information from us without a sales pitch.

This is a hard business and we aren’t perfect, but we do our best. Keep in mind that there isn’t a college course about how to answer questions about water treatment, so the staff who answer our phones learn to talk on the phone by talking on the phone. By winging it.  It’s like learning to swim by jumping out of the boat. Also keep in mind that our phone sales people are mainly occupied with office management, website design and maintenance, building products,  managing inventory, keeping records, packing packages, and a lot more. When you call, you’re actually talking with someone involved in the business, not a phone bank person who only knows how to take orders.

So be patient with us. Not a single one of us has a degree in phone sales.

City Water: Take Nothing for Granted

The two discolored carbon block cartridges in the photo turned blood red with rust stains and clogged after only two months of service at a home served by a small municipal water supply in Texas. The cartridges are 4.5″ X 20″ carbon blocks that were installed in tandem, so that each got only half of the water flowing into the home. Use was moderate.

The condition of the filters underlines the lesson that we are learning from news from Flint, Michigan and the many other poor water quality stories that are surfacing involving city water systems. The lesson is that city water is not necessarily as safe as we have always assumed–that it isn’t, in fact, being monitored to assure that every drop that comes from the treatment plant is perfect and certainly that every drop that passes through our aging delivery pipes gets to us without contamination.

The logical place to treat water to assure its excellence is at point of entry–where the water enters the home itself. Carbon filtration at point of entry and a high quality drinking water unit under the sink are becoming as common and as necessary as locks on the doors.

Ultraviolet treatment, once used almost exclusively on unchlorinated wells, is now becoming a common fixture in city homes as “boil water” alerts and disinfection failures become more common.  UV provides a margin of safety even where water is chlorinated.

A typical water molecule will stick around in an ocean for, on average, a few thousand years. In rivers, a water molecule won’t dawdle as long — just a couple weeks to several months. But a water molecule hunkered down in groundwater might be around for 10,000 years.

Scientists have a name for how long water molecules remain in any given system: “residence time.” And “transit” or “travel” time is how long it takes for water to get through a system.

Kevin McGuire, PhD, an associate professor of hydrology at Virginia Tech, explains the difference like this: If you could take the age of every human being on the planet right now, you would get an average age — or the average time, at this moment, that people reside on Earth. That’s “residence” time.

But that, McGuire says, is different from taking the average age of everyone who passes away today — those who pass through the system of life. That would be the “transit” time.

But going back to water, residence time and transit time are crucial measurements when it comes to taking care of this critical natural resource.

Measuring a moving target

Getting a grip on these numbers can help us understand and protect our environment. They can be used for things like predicting how a pollutant will affect any given system, or how quickly pollution might move through a system. Scientists, given better ways to track water and its movements, might be able to show more accurately how much water is in any given system, or how safe that water is, or how it might be replaced.

But those numbers aren’t easy to figure out. “The idea of this water residence time, or the travel time or the age, it’s really sort of where some of the cutting-edge science is,” says McGuire. “We’ve had a theory for some time to suggest that we need to go after this. It’s like a Holy Grail.”

And to figure out how water slips from one place to the next — or how long it stays put — scientists have to measure “tracers” in the water. Think of them as water-based fingerprints. “You have to have something in the water that moves like the water,” McGuire says.

One widely used tracer is tritium, a radioactive isotope in hydrogen. Tritium occurs naturally only in small amounts, but nuclear bomb testing in the late 1950s and ‘60s released much more into the atmosphere, and that is now tracked by scientists. Compounds like chlorofluorocarbons in water can be tracked, too.

Getting a grip on water

Because residence times and transit times are only estimations, the findings will differ depending on who’s doing the measuring, what method they’re using and a host of other factors. For example, the Spokane Aquifer Joint Board in Washington state uses this chart from a 1979 book, “Groundwater,” that estimates the residence time in oceans and seas to be about 4,000 years. The authors of that book estimated the residence time of rivers to be about two weeks and all the water in the part of the atmosphere that supports life to be less than a week.

Another example: Italian scientists measured the transit time and residence time in a defined body of water — the Adriatic Sea — and even then, the numbers differed depending on where the “tracers” enter the sea. The authors figured the average transit time in the Adriatic is 170 to 185 days. The residence time averaged 150 to 168 days.

Gathering the data

The challenge now in determining these numbers is getting enough data. The technology to gather and analyze samples has been prohibitively expensive until the last decade or so, McGuire says.

That’s getting better, McGuire says, providing more data to crunch and more accurate numbers in the hands of the people caring for different water sources. And it comes none too soon.

According to the United Nations, more than 2 million tons of sewage drain into the world’s waters every day, and every year more people die from unsafe water than die from all forms of violence, including war, according to the United Nations. The World Health Organization reports more than 1 billion people have no access to safe drinking water. By some estimates, 2.200 children die every day from diarrhea caused by unsafe drinking water.

Of all the water in the world, only about 3 percent is freshwater, and some 68 percent of that is locked up in glaciers and ice, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. With so much of that endangered, it’s more important than ever to find ways to use it wisely.

Source: Mother Nature Network.  The source article includes videos.

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

Gazette Famous Water Pictures: The St. Francis Dam

The ill-fated St. Francis Dam, shown above, became one of the largest but least discussed man made tragedies in US History when it burst in 1928, killing some 450 people.

The St. Francis Dam was a curved concrete gravity dam, built to create a large regulating and storage reservoir for the City of Los Angeles. The reservoir was an integral part of the city’s Los Angeles Aqueduct water supply infrastructure. It was located in San Francisquito Canyon of the Sierra Pelona Mountains, about 40 miles (64 km) northwest of Downtown Los Angeles, and approximately 10 miles (16 km) north of the present day city of Santa Clarita.

The dam was designed and built between 1924 and 1926 by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, then named the Bureau of Water Works and Supply. The department was under the direction of its General Manager and Chief Engineer, William Mulholland.

At 11:57 PM on March 12, 1928, the dam catastrophically failed, and the resulting flood took the lives of as many as 431 people. The collapse of the St. Francis Dam is considered to be one of the worst American civil engineering disasters of the 20th century and remains the second-greatest loss of life in California’s history, after the1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. The disaster marked the end of Mulholland’s career.

St. Francis Dam, after the deluge.

Newsweek Video Account