DI resin

What are ya'll doing for DI tank change outs?
Are you using a service that you ship the tank off to, or are you purchasing resin and changing it out yourself?

We have been using an exchange service for about 10 years now. No real problems, switching over tanks takes about 5 minutes compared to switching out resin which took about 1 hour. We have used ABA Water Systems as our source for resin. I think cost is about $70.00 per tank. If you have any more questions let me know. Mark

I use a reverse osmosis system that you can buy for about $300 bucks from McMaster-Carr. My unit makes about a gal /hour and is enough for 4 wire machines. Cost of water?... only the filters and my water comes out of this thing with conductance of 15-17. Ready for use in the machine. Now my resin hardly ever needs to be changed. Resin in the machine is used only to maintain the conductance level, not bring it down from tap water level which can be as high as 1000 or more depending on where you get your water.

TMD

Space I currently have a tank sent off to ABA, but shipping tank up is an outrage, drained and dried for over a month before shipping.

MetDoc, is it the reverse osmosis polypropylen water filtration system with the 2-micron and 1-micron carbon filter?

Thank you both.

I looked on the filter boxes for particle size, but could not find it. My guess is that it is two microns. Mine is a four filter system. The #4 filter in the system is a charcoal filter which only purifies the "taste" part of the process . Since I am not concerned about taste I took it out and found out that it was the main culprit in the system degradation. It would plug up about every 6 months or so and the other filters last a year or two so I do not use the carbon (4th) filter in the system. It contributes nothing to the conductance level. Without this 4th filter my water is still in the 15-17 range which is very good in my opinion. Shipping rates have gotten so high that I do not ship my spent resin back to ABA anymore. I just stockpile it. I only add about 1 cu. ft per year so is no big deal. Some day when I drive back to minnesota I will throw 10 boxes in the back and the savings in shipping will pay for my trip there !

TMD

TMD: your r/o system makes 1 gal per hour? On our wire machine that would take days to fill up the DA unit. Is there something I am missing, is this unit used to just tune up the water for topping off the DA or for filling after dumping the DA unit? Thanks Mark

When I am going to change water out in the DA I begin in advance by accumulating about 200 gal of water in heavy duty rubbermaid tanks. When those are full I can make a change and have enough to keep going without shutting anything down. The unit makes about 24 gal/day and I only use about 15 gal per day in the 4 machines so can store the extra and always have backup. The r.o. is taking water from the city supply and giving me water ready to use in the machines. This way the resin in the machine has very little to do, just bring the conductance down a few points. Resin lasts a long long time. I get about 700-1000 gallons of water for the price of 3 filters (about $100) so water is costing about 7 to 10c / gal.

TMD