perfect water filtration system and importants of TDS meter

[rsteagall]

Please move this to Equipment forum - my posting mistake

Well, I thought I'd share the experience I had today. I have a kent deion-200 water system which includes a carbon block filter - and 2 mixed resin di filters all in series. All this is being fed by a standard kenmore external carbon refrigerator filter. Obviously this is a straight

I knew it was getting time to change my DI and Carbon filters. The ones I had were color changing that was supposed to tell you when the resin was exhausted. Today I received my shipment from WaterFiltersOnline.com . I had ordered all new replacement filters and an inline dual TDS meter:

http://www.waterfiltersonline.com/detail.asp?product_id=USF_PCF1-10MB
http://www.waterfiltersonline.com/detail.asp?product_id=KX_Plus5
http://www.waterfiltersonline.com/detail.asp?product_id=tds-meter-inline

Before I installed my new filters, I decided to install the TDS meter first so that I could see how my old filters were running. Low and behold, the water coming out was "dirtier" than the water going in! Inbound the meter was reading 182ppm and outbound the meter was reading 238ppm. I thought at first I had them reversed or something, but I didn't I guess the resin had exhausted and was leaching solids back into the water supply instead of removing them. No wonder I'm seeing more hair algae, more flat worms, and more bristle worms than ever before!

I gladly replaced the filters with my new ones and flushed the system with about 4-5 gallons of water running through at full stream. Now the TDS meter is reading 182ppm inbound and 000ppm outbound! Swhewwwwwwwwwww! What a difference!

I'll be doing a double water change this weekend. For those of you that don't have a TDS meter, I strongly suggest you contacting WaterFiltersOnline.com and ordering one. They were great help to me and were very good communicators (email only). They don't rape you on shipping either. I ordered it Tuesday and received it today for only $6 and their filters are priced competitively.

Do yourself a favor and test your water filtration system. Don't rely on the "replace every 6 months" method.

What a learning experience I had in the past 1.5 hours.

-Ryan

 

[RandalB]

A TDS meter is Definately the most important RO unit Acessory. Spend the $15-25 and it will pay for itself.

RandalB

 

[rsteagall]

Randal, without turning this into a ro/di vs ro vs di thread, how do you feel about straight DI systems since I see that you are a RO unit builder.

 

[RandalB]

It depends on the TDS of your feed water, if you have very hard water it is more effort intensive to use say, a separate bed DI unit as the resin will exhaust quickly requiring constant recharging. It is more cost efficient than RO or RO/DI, but it gets to be a PITA real quick.

RandalB

 

[rsteagall]

What do you think the maximum ppm should be before filters are replaced?

 

[RandalB]

Ummm, you may want to start a thread or just Email or PM. I'd hate to be a thread Hijacker...

RandalB

 

[rsteagall]

Gotcha... Lets keep this thread to what the topic is.

 

[merlock116]

$30 a DI cartridge is way overpriced.

get a refillable cartridge and non-color changing mixed-bed resin in bulk from your local water purification store since you already have tds meter. it comes out to less than $5 per refill. look up "water purification" in yahoo yellow pages and call around.

ebay has good deals on carbon and sediment cartridges too.

 

[rsteagall]

I'll look into that for sure. Thanks for the tip.