TDS How high?

[Danfire]

Since I bought my TDS meter I've been testing everything...pleased to say the water I get off a friend is 000, my tap water is 245...I put some pure in a bottle under the sink months ago for my wife to use in her iron and steamer...I don't know what it was reading when I poured it out last year but it's now reading 010...my questions are; will stored water increase its TDS over time and how high a reading is it ok to clean with?

 

[Taxlossloz]

I have cleaned with 150 TDS ...

Looked a right mess and was hard to trad off

I got hose mixed up and put waste in van

I regularly go to 15 but I should stay below 10 I just can't be arsed changing resin !

 

[steve garwood]

Since I bought my TDS meter I've been testing everything...pleased to say the water I get off a friend is 000, my tap water is 245...I put some pure in a bottle under the sink months ago for my wife to use in her iron and steamer...I don't know what it was reading when I poured it out last year but it's now reading 010...my questions are; will stored water increase its TDS over time and how high a reading is it ok to clean with?

There is not a definitive answer to how high you can go. You will get loads of different answers to this. I will personally go to 005, but my mate Joe goes up to 010

 

[spruce]

If the water was pure to begin with then it will theoretically remain pure. It of course will absorb what ever impurities were in the container. If its a sealed container, then it can't be contaminated from the environment.

What you can never guarantee is what happened to the bottle after you filled it. Was the container you filled it from contaminated? Was the water pure in the first place or did someone top the bottle up from the tap inadvertently? You don't know and will never know.

A tds of 10 for use in your iron is no problem.

However, pure water in Plastic containers will leach any impurities from the plastic. These impurities could even be whats left over from when the container was made. This is why there is a strong movement about plastic bottles used for bottled drinking water, ie Volvic, Evian etc.

Personally I wouldn't make a big issue of it. In the early days I had a wfp trailer with 3 x 125 liter tanks on it. I also carried 4 x 25 liter plastic drums in my Suzuki van in case I ran out of water. Once Varistream controllers became available on the market I very really needed to top up the trailer to finish the day. So these drums remained in the van for months unopened and just helped to add extra weight to the tow vehicle. (UK towing laws require an un-braked trailer not weigh more than 50% of the tow vehicles weight. As the trailer was slightly over the 50% mark even with me driving and a full tank of fuel, the 100kgs of water made towing the trailer legal. I always called it ballast.)

On occasion I did fill the trailer with water from all of those drums and never had an issue with spotting. Those drums of water could have easily been a couple of months old when they were used.

Personally I agree with @steve garwood. For me I will never go above 4. But as has been stated already nobody has a definitive answer. I'm sure it has a lot to do with the left over chemical composition of the dissolved minerals in your water. Each area is different. (BTW that's my opinion and may just be that I'm writing a load of rubbish.)

I have filled a backpack with water at 10ppm and can see faint spotting on my lounge windows in the early morning sun. I very much doubt a customer would notice them, but I wouldn't be happy with the job. I changed resin in my di vessel a couple of weeks ago when the tds went from 000 to 001.

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[Taxlossloz]

Spruce you fit a lot of facts into your posts - bet your good in a pub quiz

 

[spruce]

Spruce you fit a lot of facts into your posts - bet your good in a pub quiz

/emoticons/biggrin.png Hopeless actually. Pub quizzes are all about general knowledge. If I'm not interested in a subject my ability to retain random facts is very poor. (1066 may be an important date to historians, but what happened in history on that date won't influence and/or change the course of my life today, so I don't see any point in remembering that information.) Once I'm hands on with something and it interests me and applies to me then that's different.

As far as wfp is concerned 11 years ago I couldn't understand the process. It was only when I bought a self contained trailer that I worked the water purification process out. I needed to see it operating. So everything since then is my own experience and that gleaned from others. 11 years ago when we switched to wfp there was very little information available to newbies. So when newbies are confused and feel overwhelmed, I totally relate to their feelings as that's the way I felt.

A lot of our equipment we use isn't wfp specific. It had it origins in other industries and adapted to suit ours. So most of the problems we encounter have already been experienced and solved by people before us in those industries. Its not difficult to transfer those solutions to our industry.

If you really want to know the deep down technical details of the industry, the people like Alex Gardiner and Doug Atkinson are a wealth of information. What they have forgotten most of us still have to learn or perhaps never will, especially me.

I try to read every post that members put on here and on another forum. Everyone's experiences are also important to me because they teach each of us something. Over the years I have got to know the genuine posters and those whose posts are to be taken with a pinch of salt. I may not agree with some of what these genuine posters post, but then it could be that I'm not looking at something correctly. Even if I don't agree with someone's point of view, I do try to reason on why we think differently.

I do tinker with things. So for example, when someone years ago asked this very question of what the highest tds water you can clean with I experimented on our own lounge window. That was a good question and I thought that it was a good idea to know where the limits were for us. I filled a backpack with pure, washed the windows and let them dry. I then topped the backpack up with tap water little by little and took tds measurements each time. So that's why I know that 10ppm for us was/is a 'no go' area.

The first r/o I had took our water from 254 to 4 before di. One of the suppliers said that I didn't need to use di with 4ppm. He was right but I focused on keeping it at zero. If we have spotting issues then, as the water isn't to blame, it must be down to technique or something else.

As far as towing trailers and weight were concerned I knew from being a kid that a tow car couldn't be too light when towing a caravan or the caravan would control the car. When I first towed this trailer with my Suzuki I felt uncomfortable, especially on step downhills when the road was wet. I checked the regulations on the internet and soon realised that I had a tow vehicle weight issue which the drums of water made road legal - just. But I always took extra care when towing that trailer. (It wasn't that I didn't have trailer towing experience. I first towed an 18' Jurgens caravan for a distance of nearly 3000 kms in Africa at the age of 17 from Bulawayo to Durban and back via Johannesburg. I towed a caravan for often after that, totally another 10000 kms easily before deciding caravaning wasn't our family forte. My folks loved it but as a family we didn't.)

I was glad when I was 'forced' to go van mount with 650 liters on board when we got a big cleaning contract. I felt much safer behind the wheel of the van with all that water.

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[Taxlossloz]

Great post @spruce

Now about me ...

I ran out of diesel on way to wrk today as you can't see the dash for rubbish ! We're polar opposites

 

[David K]

Over 8 ,im out . actually Think you go Much higher but dont wanna try it out myself .

 

[spruce]

Great post @spruceNow about me ...

I ran out of diesel on way to wrk today as you can't see the dash for rubbish ! We're polar opposites

As you get older @Taxlossloz you will work out that some things are such an effort to rectify that you avoid the issue at all costs. Walking back to a garage, buying a can and walking back with it full is just too much effort for me. I can't walk long distances. So the rule is that the tank gets filled up when it gets to 1/4 in the summer and 1/2 in the winter.

There is a good reason for this. I also occasionally run an Eberspatcher diesel air heater in winter which runs off the main diesel tank. The idea was that when I got frozen stiff working outside, the van cabin would be a warm retreat for a few minutes to thaw out. I chose to fuel the heater from the diesel return from the engine which isn't best practice. (Best practice is to fit another standpipe into the tank which is a dedicated fuel supply to the heater.) The return goes into the tank but it doesn't go all the way to the bottom. If the heater's diesel pump starts to suck air the heater will switch off and try to restart three times. It then will lock itself out. The idea is that it is programmed to then not start until a trained service technician repairs the problem and resets the heater using his computer. That's big bucks. There is a little trick that usually works and that is the remove the fuse for a few minutes, bleed the air out of the fuel line and restart the heater. But it isn't guaranteed to work. So the ritual of filling the tank is a way to avoid that unnecessary expense.

I also encourage the wife to follow this as well. If she gets stuck in snow in winter at least she will have enough diesel to run the engine all night and keep the car and her warm until help arrives.

The heater doesn't get used much now as the last few winters have been very mild. What I would like to do is fit a Webasto Thermotop C diesel water heater that will heat the water in the engine and kick the heater fan on to warm the cabin. They work well for that application as they were initially designed as engine preheaters in frozen northern countries. I have a fully working one on a test bench I used to evaluate turning it into a wfp hot water heater, but it wasn't powerful enough for a 2 man operation. Working flat out it would raise the water temperature in the tank from 9 degrees to 35 degrees at the brush head on one pole with a flow of 2 LPM. That may be just good enough for 1 operator, but not 2.

My office desk is like your dashboard. There is stuff waiting to be filed away from last October, but I have zero motivation to do it.

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