Pure Water Occasional, March 25, 2020 |
by Gene Franks
Someone said that if you read the works of the Greek historian Herotodus, who lived and wrote in the 5th century BC, there is no need to read the newspaper because you have already been exposed to all of humankind's majesty, cruelty and stupidity: the newspaper just tells the same old stories with different names and places. The same is true of the water news that the Pure Water Occasional has dutifully collected and reported over the years.
To illustrate, below is the entire "water news" section from a ten-year-old Occasional. It is from the post-Valentine's Day issue of 2010, a few weeks before the massive Gulf oil spill would dominate the water news for some time. As you read, do me the favor of clicking a couple of the links, because I have a point to make about that, too.
Water News from Around the World
While you were addressing your Valentines, a lot of important things happened. Follow the inks if you want to read more.
New "horizontal fracking" techniques being used with gas wells are a water quality disaster. We may have to choose between natural gas and drinking water.
A plan is afoot to dig giant tunnels to take water to thirsty areas of Southern California.
A new building at University of California at San Francisco will be 20% more water efficient than comparable conventional buildings. The secret is waterless urinals.
So, with a few name changes, you could almost be reading the water news section from last month's Occasional. With the notable absence of flooding (Katrina, five years earlier, was old news) and melting and warming and the rising of sea levels, which have become everyday water news events, most of the ten-year-old items could be read as today's news. You have discussion of the latest pollutants; farmers and conservationists fighting about water; plastic bottles are a rapidly growing problem; nuclear power plants consume and pollute massive amounts of water; the US military pollutes shamelessly and routinely lies about it; new water treatment methods are being developed; plans are afoot to move water from wet areas to dry; bacteria play an essential role in water treatment; waste water recycling is growing in importance; pollution from "pharmaceuticals" is a rapidly growing problem; fracking is a threat to water supplies; chemicals in water are doing strange things to fish (and probably to people).
The reason I asked you to click a few of the 10-year-old water news links is to illustrate how quickly they go away. Most of the articles linked have been taken down. The histories of Herotodus are still around after 2,500 years, but almost all internet news articles disappear as soon as the news cycle rolls on and the ad-generated income from clicks dies out.
Why You Should Read the Pure Water Gazette
This brings me to one of the main reasons the Pure Water Gazette website exists. It acts as a repository for many very significant water articles and facts that would otherwise disappear. More than that, the Gazette presents these articles in an ad-free format where you can read without being bombarded by pop-ups and demands that you "sign up" for something in order to keep reading. And the Gazette's articles don't go away. The Gazette website now hosts 1500 water and water treatment articles, some good and some bad, but all of them available in an easy-to-read format and without ads that will follow you to the grave.
The Occasional issue that I took the water news section from is a good example. It features a classic article about fluoride by noted water treatment veteran C.E."Chubb" Michaud. We reprinted Chubb's article in the Occasional (see it here and here) and more recently in the Pure Water Gazette. Here's the original from Water Conditioning and Purification magazine. If you click the Water Conditioning and Purification link you'll find that they've taken the article down. I rest my case.
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Question: I have a backwashing filter in my home. During the backwash, I would like to completely shut off the water to the rest of the system to prevent it from bypassing this filter. In other words, I don't want any untreated water getting to my RO unit. How do I do this?
Answer: Sending water to the home while the filter is regenerating is a standard feature on residential filters and it's called "hard water bypass." When the filter is regenerating, if there is a call for water in the home, the filter control sends unfiltered water to the point of use rather than no water at all. The rationale is that filters normally regenerate in the middle of the night when there is little or no water used, but if someone needs water they would rather have unfiltered water than none at all. A common example would be a toilet flush. A more dramatic example is a house fire. If your house is on fire, you usually don't care if the water is filtered or not and you don't want to wait for the filter to finish its regeneration cycle.
Most control valves can be purchased with an option called "no hard water bypass" which does exactly what you are asking for: it sends no water to the service lines when regeneration is taking place. These systems are rare and a typical user who wants no hard water bypass would be, for example, for an industrial application where a delicate machine would be damaged by untreated water. Go here for more information. |
FAQ
Filtering Out the COVID-19
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Question: Which filter is best to remove the Corona virus?
Answer: Although the virus is not considered even remotely a threat by transmission by drinking water, below is the CDC's full statement from their website. This should be reassuring, and we hope it will convince you that you do not need to buy a special filter or a UV unit to protect against COVID-19.
Question: Can the COVID-19 virus spread through drinking water?
Answer: The COVID-19 virus has not been detected in drinking water. Conventional water treatment methods that use filtration and disinfection, such as those in most municipal drinking water systems, should remove or inactivate the virus that causes COVID-19.
Question: Is the COVID-19 virus found in feces?
Answer: The virus that causes COVID-19 has been detected in the feces of some patients diagnosed with COVID-19. The amount of virus released from the body (shed) in stool, how long the virus is shed, and whether the virus in stool is infectious are not known. The risk of transmission of COVID-19 from the feces of an infected person is also unknown. However, the risk is expected to be low based on data from previous outbreaks of related coronoviruses, such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). There have been no reports of fecal-oral transmission of COVID-19 to date.
Question: Can the COVID-19 virus spread through pools and hot tubs?
Answer: There is no evidence that COVID-19 can be spread to humans through the use of pools and hot tubs. Proper operation, maintenance, and disinfection (e.g., with chlorine and bromine) of pools and hot tubs should remove or inactivate the virus that causes COVID-19.
Question: Can the COVID-19 virus spread through sewerage systems?
Answer: CDC is reviewing all data on COVID-19 transmission as information becomes available. At this time, the risk of transmission of the virus that causes COVID-19 through sewerage systems is thought to be low. Although transmission of COVID-19 through sewerage may be possible, there is no evidence to date that this has occurred. This guidance will be updated as necessary as new evidence is assessed.
SARS, a similar coronavirus, has been detected in untreated sewage for up to 2 to 14 days. In the 2003 SARS outbreak, there was documented transmission associated with sewage aerosols. Data suggest that standard municipal wastewater system chlorination practices may be sufficient to inactivate coronaviruses, as long as utilities monitor free available chlorine during treatment to ensure it has not been depleted.
Wastewater and sewage workers should use standard practices, practice basic hygiene precautions, and wear personal protective equipment (PPE) as prescribed for current work tasks.
Question: Should wastewater workers take extra precautions to protect themselves from the COVID-19 virus?
Answer: Wastewater treatment plant operations should ensure workers follow routine practices to prevent exposure to wastewater. These include using engineering and administrative controls, safe work practices, and PPE normally required for work tasks when handling untreated wastewater. No additional COVID-19-specific protections are recommended for employees involved in wastewater management operations, including those at wastewater treatment facilities. |
Garden Hose Filters Are Versatile
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The garden hose filter above provides chemical-free water for a raised-bed garden. Garden hose filters offer an easy, convenient way to provide excellent water for plants, animals and people–for irrigation, for drinking, for washing cars, for pH amendment, for iron removal, for removing chlorine or chloramine, for any purpose that requires high quality water. Garden hose filters come in four sizes and use standard-sized filter cartridges, so the possible applications are many.
Here are some pages to look at:
Garden Hose Softener. (A 10,000 grain water softener set up for garden hose operation. A favorite of RV owners and car washers).
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PFAS Treatment with Plasma
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With billions of dollars being spent to clean up contaminated land from PFAS, efforts are underway to find the best method to remove what are being called ‘forever chemicals’ seeping into water supplies.
A new study in the US has shown that rather than filtering out the chemicals using activated carbon or reverse osmosis, in fact, the best way is to destroy them.
Researchers from Drexel University in Pennsylvania have developed what is being called a ‘plasmatron’ technology that they claim breaks down PFAS contaminants, rather than filtering them out.
They said that with current filtration methods, such as carbon filters, PFAS are merely collected, not destroyed, so “unless the filters are incinerated at high temperatures”, the used filters “become a new source of PFAS”.
Why plasma?
Known as perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), these chemicals are part of a larger group referred to as per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).
With PFAS leaching into ground and surface water from products sitting in landfills for decades, the chemicals do not readily biodegrade. A total of 700 PFAS-contaminated sites were recently identified in the US.
The US Department of Defense is said to be spending “billions of dollars” to clean up contaminated soil water supplies surrounding military bases where PFAS fire-fighting foam has been used.
A study from Duke University and North Carolina State University recently tested point of use/entry systems for their effectiveness in removing PFAS from household water supplies.
Meanwhile, Orange County in the US has started a $1.4 million project with Carollo to explore PFAS removal solutions, including reviewing 10 different carbons and four different resins.
The Drexel team believe that to eliminate these chemicals, you need to split the carbon-fluoride bond. By breaking these chains into smaller pieces, it renders the PFAS inert.
To then remove the fluoride – the temperature of the water needs to be raised to 1,000 Celsius – ten times the temperature of boiling water.
With this “clearly not feasible for water treatment operations” due to the high energy costs, the researchers proposed the use of highly energized gas, or plasma, to activate the PFAS atoms without heating the water.
How does the plasmatron work?
Published in the journal Environmental Science: Water Research & Technology, the study saw the development of a device called a “gliding arc plasmatron”.
Creating a rotating electromagnetic field that splits the chemicals apart in the water, the process was described as the chemical equivalent of “using a blender to make a smoothie”.
Researchers claim the process takes one hour and uses less energy than it takes to boil a kettle while removing more than 90 per cent of PFAS from the water.
The team said previous plasma treatment methods on PFAS did not lend themselves to being easily scaled up for use at large treatment facilities.
Alexander Fridman, PhD and director of the Nyheim Plasma Institute, said the technology could be adjusted to treat contaminated soil, achieving “near-complete defluorination of PFAS compounds”.
What the researchers said
Christopher Sales, PhD, associate professor of environmental engineering at Drexel, said: “The current standard for dealing with PFAS-contaminated water is activated carbon filters. But the problem is that it only collects the PFAS, it doesn’t destroy it.
“So unless the filters are incinerated at high temperatures, the spent filters become a new source of PFAS that can make its way back into the environment through landfill runoff and seepage.”
Fridman added: “Cold plasma has the potential to help us eliminate a variety of chemical toxins that threaten our food and drinking water supplies.”
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Our compact residential chlorination system needs no electricity. The simple chlorine pump operates on water pressure, and it needs no expensive metering devices because the rate of flow through the water pipe determines the rate of chlorine injection. No over-sized retention tank is required because the system uses an advanced design compact tank that outperforms much larger conventional retention tanks.
The system consists of a sediment filter, a Dosatron NSF certified 14 gallon per minute water driven injection pump, a 15 gallon solution tank, and the advanced 12″ X 60″APW (Nelsen) compact retention tank. The system has everything needed to treat bacteria, iron, manganese, or hydrogen sulfide odor.
A filter appropriate to the targeted contaminant must be added after the retention tank. The filter is not included. The equipment shown on this page is pre-treatment for filtration.
The compact all-in-one chlorination system is designed for use in standard residential applications, but it can be easily adapted to other uses. It is especially good for part-time residences like summer homes or hunting cabins because the retention tank has a bottom drain that makes winterization easy. It’s also perfect for remote locations like workshops, barns, or remote apartments. The fact that no power is needed, of course, makes it ideal for off-grid homes.
Unlike electric pumps, the water-powered system can be installed anywhere in the water line without regard to the well’s pressure tank or electrical system.
The complete chlorination system, without filter, is currently priced at only $1095.
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Handel's Water Music:
Gazette’s Famous Water Pictures Series
Georg Frideric Handel (left) and King George I on the Thames River, 17 July 1717. Painting by Edouard Hamman (1819–88).
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The Water Music is a collection of orchestral movements, often published as three suites, composed by George Frideric Handel. It premiered on 17 July 1717 after King George I had requested a concert on the River Thames.
The usual explanation for the gala on-the-water concert is that the king was feeling heat from an opposing political faction gathering around his son, the Prince of Wales, and he staged a big public event to draw attention away from his son and to himself.
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Places to visit for additional information:
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Thanks for reading and be sure to check out the next Occasional!
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