I’m back... sort of.. maybe.

[Orion]

It’s been about 5 years since I took down my tank and my family and I moved to a new home out in Warrenton, VA. I had intentions of putting it back up or even going with a bigger tank but that never happened.  Running out of projects to do being quarantined around the house and I am starting to get that itch again...

Good news is I still have most of the equipment from the previous build including a controller, RO, skimmer, ato, dosing pumps,  etc. 

 

Trying to think of some questions to ask the group..

One issue I can think of is we are on well water where I live. From what I remember this can play havoc on a RO membrane. We also have a water softener for the home. Is this a huge deal? 

 

Ryan

[YHSublime]

Hey dude! Welcome back, sorta?! I think @Origami will still be your huckleberry when it comes to well water questions, but I imagine a quick phone call to Air Water and Ice would also get you some pretty solid info! They are fresh on my brain, since I got a text from them at 3am this morning!

[epleeds]

I’m on a well running a spectrapure 90 maxcap and don’t have any issues. I’m out in Nokesville. 

[flooddc]

Welcome back! I am on well water and it’s actually much better than city water.

I have a neutralizer (to increase my pH) and water softener. My tds reading is around 70 coming in to the rodi. So far my membrane and di lasted quite a long tine.

I have seen other well water reefer suffered from gas from the well water and must de-gas (Using a de-gaser) to improve the rodi performance. Other than that, I love well water. Tasted better than bottled spring water and tap water

[Orion]

12 hours ago, flooddc said:

Welcome back! I am on well water and it’s actually much better than city water.

I have a neutralizer (to increase my pH) and water softener. My tds reading is around 70 coming in to the rodi. So far my membrane and di lasted quite a long tine.

I have seen other well water reefer suffered from gas from the well water and must de-gas (Using a de-gaser) to improve the rodi performance. Other than that, I love well water. Tasted better than bottled spring water and tap water

Thanks all,

 

I should probably just hook up my RODI first and see what happens. FWIW it’s a BRS model.. I believe a 3 stage.

I never changed the membrane on it.. and it’s over 5 years old (hasn’t been used). Is it still good?

[flooddc]

Yeah! Hook it up to see. Most-likely will need to place the membrane and all the filters.

[Origami]

Welcome back.  If you've got good sediment filtering in your house and in your RO/DI, then the biggest problem you might face is high levels of dissolved CO2 that can rapidly exhaust your DI resin bed. It's not uncommon for those of us on wells to have high dissolved CO2 and I've seen mixed bed DI resin stages exhaust after as little as 50 gallons of DI water production. I was probably only getting about 70 gallons out before my resin would exhaust and it became a very expensive prospect to continue doing it the way I was doing it. Basically, what was happening was that the dissolved CO2 (which forms a negative ion also known as an anion) would quickly deplete the anion resin in my resin bed.

 

Some people with this problem approach it by degassing the water before pushing it through the RO/DI system. They do this by bubbling fresh air through a reservoir to blow off the CO2 and then pump it through the DI stage using an attached booster pump. Spectrapure has a diagram of the approach on their website, or used to. That's probably one of the better, less expensive approaches, actually.

 

In my case, I wanted to try something different and had an ICP OES test run on my well water and determined that I had very few negative ions that were of concern in my water. I did have positive ions (such as metal ions) in the water, so I opted to install just cation resins and skipped the mixed bed type or anion resin types and went ahead and let the dissolved CO2 pass by along with the few "don't care" negative ions in the water. Since I'd already separated a bunch of mixed bed resin into anion and cation resin components, I had the resin on hand that I could easily recharge, further reducing operating expense.

 

That's how I dealt with it anyway.