epleeds January 11, 2019 Share January 11, 2019 I have been burning through resin and upon talking with spectrapure they said I should check my CO2 levels in the water. Turns out they say under 10ppm is reasonable. I’m at 41ppm based off of their test kit. He he said I could set up a degassing tower but I’m not sure how that would work. He sent me a link to an R2R thread but without seeing one first hand, it’s a little difficult to determine how it works. Since a a bunch of other people are on well water, I’m wondering if anyone has one and if I can come check it out. I am limited on space so that is a concern also. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Origami January 11, 2019 Share January 11, 2019 No. I built a small one one but never hooked it up. I even have a 30-gallon storage container and a DC RV pump that I was going to use to build an even larger one but... I never got around to that either. This IS what I did do, however, and my experience: First, I tried going without DI resin - for a similar reason that you're probably contemplating: Burning through expensive DI resin. I was going through a whole resin charge after less than 100 gallons of production. But, before taking the resin out, I sent in samples of my tap water (well water) and my RO water to ATI for an ICP-OES test. They allow you to send in two vials - one being your tank water and the other your fresh water and they run them both through the ICP-OES equipment. That's two ICP tests for the price of one more-less. (They don't test the FW vial for alkalinity, though.) My water came back rather clean except it had a small amount of trace metals in it with nickel being among the higher ones. Still, I gave it a shot and took the resin out. That didn't work out for me. After some months, I noticed corals starting to look bad and then entered a time of STN. I lost a lot for a reason I wasn't sure about. Sent more water samples in and found that my nickel levels were unusually high. Then, going back to my ICP test results, I noticed that most every "(really) bad ion" that was in my well water was positively charged. Well, the dissolved CO2 molecule is associates itself with the OH- in water and is, therefore, negatively charged. So what I did was to run just cation resin which grabs positive charges and skipped the anion resin. Basically, I ignore the dissolved CO2 and any other negative ions, letting them pass. I've been running that for 6-7 months now and things seem to be good again. The resin that I used was from batches of old mixed bed resin that I separated myself. However, I noticed a couple of months ago that BRS started carrying color-changing single-bed anion and single-bed cation resins which make this kind of setup easier for folks. Now, about degassing towers - Spectrapure has a diagram on their website. You can see it here. It basically just aerates freshwater to "blow off" the excess CO2 - an old airstone skimmer would work but, in the diagram, it's just a PVC column with an airstone bubbler at the bottom. The problem I had with this is that the stage has to precede any DI resin stage and, coming out of this device, it's under no pressure whatsoever save gravity. I wasn't terribly crazy about that idea because, with a little back pressure or clogging, I'd have water coming out of the top of the degassing tower. So I had this idea of using a bigger reservoir for aerated output and tying it in to the DI resin stages through the same kind of pump used to deliver water under pressure in recreational vehicles. Anyways, I hope this gives you something to think about and hope that you find a solution. The principles are pretty simple, though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Origami January 11, 2019 Share January 11, 2019 This old RC thread describes another approach. In this case, he holds his tap water (from a well) in a 50 gallon container with an airstone. He then uses a booster pump to feed the water from that container to his RO/DI unit. I actually kind of like that approach. It's straightforward and leaves the RO/DI processing chain intact. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now