Treating Water Without Chemicals

It appears that they are treating it with UV. Some municipalities have started to use this method for drinking water. Would you run drinking water thru your tower?

Could be activated carbon filter. Would remove lots of bacteria and other stuff, hence reducing the need for chemicals to kill or remove that stuff. This approach works great for my pool: running through sand filter then activated carbon reduced my need for chemicals in half!

It had been my understanding that carbon filters were not effective on removing bacteria. They do remove chlorine and some of the other heavy metals from water, which is all the tap mounted systems do. Not effective on well water, any bacteria in the water will get trapped by the filter and grow. My wife and I discovered this a few years ago the hard way. Ozone treatment is required for bottled water as it is effective for a while after the bottling process, helping to sterilize the inside of the bottle as well as the water. In line UV systems are also effective, used before an ozone system if both are being used. The UV light destroys the ozone before it can be effective.

Correct observation relative to activated carbon filters. They will remove organics, some heavy metals and chlorine from the water. Some activated carbon filters are good to filter at < 0.5 micron, which gets rid of most but not all bacteria, but not viruses. Ozone and/or UV is effective against most viruses.

<...carbon filters...not effective on removing bacteria...>

Correct. In removing free chlorine they remove the bacterial resilience of the water.

Hello Guest,

You don't say exactly which "Waterguard" Company or process you are talking about.

However there is a Company called "Waterguard" here: http://www.waterguardsb.com/thinkgreen.html

It appears they do have a non-chemical treatment for water:

Refer:

<"...Item 1 – How Pulsed-Power Systems Work

Electronic systems produce a pulsed, time-varying, induced electric field inside a PVC

pipe that is fitted directly into the cooling tower's re-circulating water system.

The electric signal changes the way minerals in the water precipitate, totally avoiding hardlime

scale by instead producing a non-sticking mineral powder in the bulk water.

This powder is readily filterable and mostly removed during normal blowdown, or it settles

loosely in the cooling tower basin for easy annual removal.

Bacteria are incorporated into this mineral powder, and therefore leave the system by blowdown, filtration, or settling.

The encapsulated bacteria (some of which were injured via electroporation on their membrane walls, causing cell lysis) cannot reproduce, thus resulting in an exceedingly low bacteria population.

Water softening is not necessary (in fact, it is discouraged) with this type of system treatment, and high cycles of concentration are usually obtainable, leading to significant water conservation.....">

As you can see, the process avoids the use of chemicals, and providing that settled powder is removed regularly, the process appears to be a very efficient and safe one.

I've learned something new, thank you.

Kind Regards....

Going by their process description, they appear to use electrocoagulation to precipitate out the minerals and disinfect the water. If that is indeed the case, then yes, it will work quite effectively.

Thanks. This helped with one of my questions on the CR4 board. Now if I can just find a price.

If you are talking about eliminating scale (mineral) build-up in a system, you can go to this web site: www.nataleenterprises.com and click on Scale Control. It will give you all the technical information on the process used.

http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0011916405006387

Try this link. I am not so sure about "WaterGuard". Ky

How will you gauge the efficacy of your investment? Marketers of water purification systems in all forms depend upon your ignorance and lack of tools for testing (before and after) your water is treated to show a success. There are no one step or easy answers in water treatment, even cooling towers. All permanent technologies simply reduce the load on consuming methods such as sand filters and good old blow-down. Remember the solution to pollution? The question is not whether they can achieve efficacy with the method, it is can they do it in real time in your application for a cost less than what you would pay otherwise? The only way you will ever know is to do a detailed analysis of your current system and gauge it after making changes. Either that, or do it because it sounds cool.

JT

Remember that a cooling tower concentrates the total dissolved solids [TDS] present in the water as evaporation takes place. At some point a 'blowdown' is necessary to reduce the TDS.

Tower water is normally treated with chemicals so as to maintain the divalent and trivalent precipitable species in solution to higher levels of TDS than would otherwise be possible.

Which is an economic balance.

Which increases the mean residence time. Bugs love a warm, watery, chemical-free environment in which to grow. And the, wonder of wonders, the tower sprays them into the atmosphere.....

Cooling towers contain operational risks that are high (e.g. legionella pneuophila) and need to be managed properly. It is not possible to run a cooling tower for long without some operational expenditure on chemical treatment to contain the risks.