Hi RJT:
The loss of conductivity (high resistivity) means you've removed more ions from the water than you normally would have.
A bad bottle is usually one that is less efficient at stripping out ions, so I'd expect a bad bottle to give persistently high conductivity, not low conductivity.
(De-ionized water is an electrical
insulator; the ions present are what give it it's conductivity, and the job of the DI bottle is to bind up those ions in the resin thereby lowering the conductivity to where you want it)
The two main ways abnormally low conductivity can happen:
1) The water is flowing through the DI bottle continuously, stripping out the ions faster than your cutting can replenish them.
This will happen if your conductivity probe is falsely reading high conductivity, which of course triggers the DI pump to divert water through the bottle all the time.
Maybe cleaning the probe will do the trick.
2) Some contaminant in your water (or maybe on your inconel blocks??) is precipitating the ions out by making insoluble salts.
You'd need to make a lot of precipitate to drop the conductivity of such a big water volume a lot; so just how much white powder was there on the parts and fixture?
The third possibility, of course, is that the actual water conductivity is fine or even high and the probe has glitched.
Do you have a conductivity meter that is separate from the machine so you can check?
A crude and dirty way to find out is to piss in the water tank (just kidding) and see if the DI pump comes on.
Cheers
Marcus
Implant Mechanix • Design & Innovation > HOME
www.vancouverwireedm.com