Manual Filter Controls:  A case where simple is sometimes better

by Gene Franks

Backwashing water filters used for removal of sediment,  chlorine, chemicals, iron, hydrogen sulfide odor and many other water contaminants are regulated by control devices that range from simple to very complex. The main function of the valve is to control the time and duration of backwash (where water is reversed in the filter tank to clean and resettle the media bed) and rinse (where water is pushed downward through the media at a fast rate to rinse and settle it after the backwash).

These functions can be controlled by fully electronic or electrically driven mechanical timing devices that regenerate the filter at preset times and for preset durations.  The electronic versions are more versatile than the mechanical and offer many more options.  For example, an electronic controller can be set up to regenerate the filter every other Sunday at 3:51 AM,  backwashing for 6 minutes then rinsing for one minute.  Depending on the product, mechanical timers offer fewer options. With the most popular mechanical control (the Fleck 5600), for example, you could choose to regenerate every day, every other day, every third day,  fourth day, every sixth day, or every 12th day, but you could not choose to regenerate every Sunday or every eighth day.  With the standard 5600 you also have no control over duration of the functions: it’s a 15 minute backwash and a 10 minute rinse whether your filter needs this much time or not.  (Unless you’re running an iron filter or have very sandy well water, you probably don’t need this much time, but the filter is preset to accommodate the “worst case” user so even clean city water gets a 15-minute backwash.)

Totally Manual Control

A less frequently used control valve is the totally manual (non-electric) Fleck 2510 control pictured below.

This control valve requires no electricity and no programming.  It has a three-choice selection lever that send water to the home (Service position), backwashes the filter, or rinses the filter.

This very simple valve not only costs less, but it works better in some situations than more expensive controllers. Here are some examples.

• Remote areas where there is no electricity.
• If you have electricity, but it isn’t dependable.  It’s easier to manually regenerate a filter than to repeatedly reset an electric control system.
• Seasonal homes or homes where the inhabitants travel frequently.  It’s easier to backwash your filter manually than to constantly reset an automatic system to fit your schedule.
• When backwash duration requirement might change. Some wells take on large amounts of sediment after a rain, or a city water filter might pick up a large amount of dirt when there is city water line maintenance,.  At such times, it’s easier to simply give the filter its needed backwash manually than to reprogram your electronic controller.
• If price is important.  Substituting a manual backwash control can cut several dollars off the purchase price of a standard backwashing filter.
• If saving water is important.  If you want to backwash your clean city water carbon backwashing filter once a month  for five minutes only (not an unreasonable schedule). you can save almost 300 gallons per month, as compared with a standard electro-mechanical control valve!

You can find a manual controller as well as a variety of automatic controllers here. 

Source: Global Times.

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Golf courses conserve water as fairways turn from green to brown

By Nancy Szokan December 23, 2014

Gazette Introductory Note: This article is really good news. If golfers can learn to play on courses that aren’t lush green, so too, perhaps, can footballers,  baseballers, and soccer players.  After that maybe people can learn to hold a backyard barbeque on a lawn that’s brownish or take their kids to play in a city park where the color of the grass reflects the season and recent weather conditions. When you think of it,  having golf courses and cemeteries that are eternally green is like living in a bubble. Life is richer when you experience change, and you don’t really appreciate green grass unless it’s sometimes brown.–Hardly Waite.

You know that climate change is scaring people when no less an authority than Golf Digest says, “The new reality for American golf is that water is far too precious to be squandered on golf courses.”

That’s how Ron Whitten begins his piece praising two “iconic” American courses that have implemented “startling and instructive” water- ­conservation programs.

 U.S. Open golf tournament in Pinehurst, N.C.

Pasatiempo Golf Club is located in Santa Cruz, Calif., which is going through an extended drought; mandatory water restrictions have shut off irrigation on at least the first 75 yards of each fairway, and roughs are yellowed and thin. “Pace of play has improved because there’s little time spent looking for balls in high rough,” Whitten writes.

More impressive is Pinehurst No. 2, in North Carolina, which has cut its water consumption from 55 million gallons in 2009 to 15 million this year. When it hosted the men’s and women’s U.S. Open championships in June, television viewers saw fairways that were yellowish or even brown instead of green, lined with “vast stretches of exposed sand.”

The fairways stayed brown until it rained, under Pinehurst’s new policy: “Let nature dictate the course conditions.”

Source: Washington Post.

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A Green Dilemma for the Holidays:
Better to Shop Online or In-Store?

By Crystal Gammon

The conventional wisdom has been that shopping online is environmentally preferable to going to a brick-and-mortar store. But a new study suggests it’s not quite as simple as that.

Gazette Introductory Note: The green dilemma presented here is a lot like the environmental nitpicking that goes on with such issues as paper vs. plastic at the supermarket, real vs. artificial for Christmas trees, or burial vs. cremation when the whole thing winds down.  The real answer is usually hardly mentioned or at best played down: the best tree is no tree, the best bag is no bag, and the worst choice of all at the very end is to put off dying. Holiday purchasing is, of course, so complex an issue that a mere consideration of how the package gets to your home is only one of dozens of factors that would have to be considered  to come to a rational decision. My own answer is that whether you drive to the mall to pick up the baseball cap for your cousin or have it delivered in a UPS truck is largely unimportant; what is important is whether you should buy the cap in the first place.  There are lots of alternatives to buying things.  We need to be brave enough to explore them rather than simply caving in every time the merchants, brick-and-mortar or online, start ringing the bells of Christmas.  Bah, Humbug!– Hardly Waite.

As holiday packages arrive at doorsteps and gifts pile up under Christmas trees, environmentally-minded consumers may wonder, what’s the most carbon-conscious way to shop — online or in-store?

Various studies in recent years have suggested that online shopping typically packs a lower carbon punch than shopping at brick-and-mortar stores. But new research published online in the Journal of Cleaner Production suggests the story is more complicated than that.

“Consumer travel and behavior is critical,” said Patricia van Loon, a logistics researcher at the international business school INSEAD and lead author of the study. The key, she said, is to minimize the number of miles driven per item — whether by the shopper, a local delivery van, or a FedEx truck.

A typical online order, with goods delivered by truck, has a carbon footprint roughly three times as large as a brick-and-mortar shopping trip, according to van Loon’s analysis, which looked at U.K. shoppers buying household goods. That’s because brick-and-mortar shoppers typically buy many more items at once than online customers, she said. Moreover, online shoppers will often make extra trips to the store anyway — to pick up items they forgot to order, return unwanted ones, or to browse and test products — a factor previous studies largely ignored.

On an item-by-item basis, however, online shopping usually does win out, van Loon’s analysis shows. Purchasing a single item online and having it delivered by truck has roughly half the carbon footprint as driving to a local store to buy it, she found. Yet her calculation is based on driving — the results would be different in a bicycle-centric country like the Netherlands, the study points out, or in a place like Manhattan, where pedestrians and public transportation dominate.

Clearly, online shopping continues to boom. Amazon, the United States’ largest online retailer, did nearly $75 billion in web-based sales last year, including the 37 million items — 426 per second — it sold on Cyber Monday. This year, total online sales on that day in the U.S. grew by 17 percent, to over $2 billion, making it the heaviest online shopping day ever.

To maximize efficiency, van Loon said, consumers generally should buy online and should plan orders so that each contains as many items as possible. “In that case, online shopping … can be even better than walking to the store,” she said, because warehouses tend to be more energy-efficient than local stores.

But numbers-crunching aside, what should a carbon-conscious shopper do?

“Give yourself more time to plan,” recommends Darby Hoover, a senior resource specialist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. She said planning ahead can allow consumers to choose more flexible shipping options — “Do you really need it to get there tomorrow?” — and to buy from companies with environmentally friendly policies, such as minimizing packaging.

And if waiting longer for a product is not an option, Hoover said, “focus on efficiency and using less stuff, and bring that approach to whatever decision you’re trying to make.”

Source: Environment 360  (Yale University).

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

There’s a lot more to determining  the carbon footprint of Rex’s new cap than whether you bought it from Amazon or at the pet store in the shopping center.–Hardly Waite.

Leave it to beavers: California joins other states in embracing the rodent

by Samantha Clark

Californians are crossing their fingers for more rain after three punishing years of drought have left streams, rivers and wetland parched.

One animal has the potential to restore these dry landscapes.

With their industrial buck teeth and flat tails, beavers and their dams offer a defense against drought, a solution to reversing the effects of climate change. The rodents are known as ecosystem engineers. And they once populated most of California (and the Bay Area) until fur traders nearly wiped them out in the 19th century.

“This state has lost more of its wetlands than all other states, and beavers can rebuild those wetlands,” said Rick Lanman of the Institute for Historical Ecology in Los Altos. “Knowing that it is native should help guide restoration efforts.”

Beaver dams bestow benefits to the environment that we humans can’t easily copy. They turn land into a sponge for water. Their gnawing and nesting promotes richer soil and slows down water, improving imperiled fish habitat. Their dams raise water tables, nourishing shrubbery alongside streams that stabilize eroding banks and add habitat for birds and deer. They also help the endangered California Red-legged frog.

After beavers move to a new area, at night, they drag a tree across a shallow stream to start a dam. They carry rocks and mud with their paws and branches with their big incisors. Water in these beaver ponds would otherwise flow away. So it’s no surprise that thirsty western states are turning to the furry critters with open arms.

“There’s a growing interest in using beaver as a habitat restoration tool,” said Michael M. Pollock, an ecosystems analyst with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle. “They create good wetland habitat much more cheaply than other restoration methods.”

Government agencies are hosting a workshop series in a few western states and writing a guide on how to use beavers for restoration. California Fish and Wildlife is starting to embrace the beaver, a shift beaver advocates applaud.

“Our effort now is to show its many sides, sides that have always existed,” said Kevin Shaffer, a fisheries manager for state Fish and Wildlife. “We are investigating how beaver promote habitat and water conservation through their habitat manipulation. We are also creating public and scientific information about the beaver, its ecological role and current regulations and laws affecting its management and conservation.”

Other arid states in the West have comprehensive policies for managing beavers. California allows beaver to be hunted or relocated and killed if they cause trouble. Utah has a beaver management plan, and New Mexico recently mandated that its Fish and Wildlife come up with a plan too. Oregon, Washington and Idaho have relocation programs.

“It would be great if we could recognize the benefit of the beaver and to resolve conflict nonlethally and manage them to continue receiving those benefits,” said Kate Lundquist, director of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center’s Water Institute, a group that is drafting beaver policy recommendations for state Fish and Wildlife.

So how would California look if beavers bounced back? A lot wetter, perhaps. Beavers once were an integral part of a vast network of wetlands throughout the state.

Locally, they range from Salinas to Sonoma County.

Given away by girdled willow branches, beavers live around the Lexington Reservoir and in Pescadero in the Santa Cruz Mountains. A mile-long stretch in the upper Los Gatos Creek has at least 10 dams. Parts of the creek have separated into beaver ponds, which provide needed refuge when flows are reduced from the reservoir up the mountain. The ponds are great rearing habitat for struggling young coho salmon and steelhead trout.

“Beaver ponds are beneficial because they also create a lot of wetland that provide a lot of food for fish,” Pollock said.

Beavers can also help reverse the rising temperatures of water, which can harm fish. The deep pools created by their dams have cooler water at the bottom.

“With a range of temperature conditions, fish are able to find the temperature that is ideal for them at a given time,” Pollock said.

Since beavers moved to the Alhambra Creek in downtown Martinez, the area has seen new species flourish. By moving mud, the beavers create a haven for bugs.

“Because we have an insect bloom, we have a bloom of all the different fish and animals up the food chain,” said Heidi Perryman, founder of the beaver advocacy group Worth a Dam and who led the effort to save a Martinez beaver family from extermination. “We’ve identified three new species of fish and seven species of bird. And we see more otter and mink than we ever saw before.”

In San Jose, a beaver has taken refuge in the dry Guadalupe River. The critter’s dam outside a dripping storm drain created a tiny oasis.

“They can get by with very little,” Pollock said. “In a number of cases, they’ve built on streams that have run dry and because they have built the dams, water flows again.”

Because beavers are so good at recharging ground water, they can make streams flow when they would otherwise run dry such as during the summer months.

California called on beavers to prevent erosion from the 1920s and 1940s in nearly half the state’s counties, including those in the Bay Area and Santa Cruz, according to a recent paper proving that beavers are native in nearly all of the state. The beaver population grew from less than a thousand to 20,000 by 1950. No one knows today’s population. 

A beaver family can improve damaged land at a cheaper cost, but restoration isn’t as simple as moving in a beaver family. They can inflict serious destruction on culverts and agriculture lands as well as flood homes and other urban areas.

State Fish and Wildlife is experimenting with artificial beaver dams to avoid moving the animal and the damage they can cause.

Still, some other Western states are reintroducing beavers to help mitigate problems related to climate change. California is on its way.

Source: Santa Cruz Sentinel.

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Countertop Reverse Osmosis Doesn’t Have to Sit on the Countertop

by Gene Franks

A Basic “Black and White” brand countertop RO unit.

The countertop reverse osmosis unit pictured above produces top quality reverse osmosis water at the rate of a couple of gallons per hour.   The water quality is equivalent to that produced by an undersink RO unit costing double the price. It is an extremely versatile machine that can be used for many purposes.

The countertop RO unit is most commonly used as a bottled water maker,  installed to the sink faucet and allowed to produce water into a bottle. When the bottle is filled, you turn the unit off. You can then leave it in place or remove it. The drain water (all reverse osmosis puts out a trickle of reject water) exits via a separate hose that is simply dropped into the sink.

The usual way to get water to the unit is with the standard diverter valve, like the one below, hooked to the kitchen faucet. You pull out the knob to divert water into the RO unit.  The knob stays out until you turn off the water.

 Standard Diverter Valve

However, there are many other uses and methods of installation.  For example, the RO unit can be attached directly to a water line in a laundry room or patio–anywhere there’s a water source and a place to send the drain water.  With a simple adapter it can take its water from a garden hose or outdoor faucet  for use on a patio or greenhouse.

With modern day sink faucets, especially those with pull-out sprayers,  it is often impossible the use the diverter valve. In this case the RO unit can be fed from an undersink water source identical to the inlet line used for undersink filters and RO units. In these installations, the feed line is pulled from under the sink and attached to the RO unit with a push-in fitting.  After water has been produced, the RO unit is removed and the  feed line is conveniently stored under the sink.  See the picture below.

A simple adapter like the one in the picture can be used to provide water from a kitchen or laundry room undersink  to a countertop reverse osmosis unit. The blue-handled valve can be located at a more convenient place nearer the delivery end of the tube if desired.  When not in use, the tube can be removed from the RO unit and stored under the sink.

Here are some more ideas for countertop RO units.

Aquarium filler. Water is collected in a large container for subsequent addition to the aquarium. The RO unit can be turned off and on manually, or a simple automatic shutoff system can be added to the RO unit that turns it off when the container is full. The shutoff system is inexpensive and easy to add to an existing countertop RO unit.

Outdoor pond filler. The unit can be allowed to fill the pond when it is turned on manually or it can be installed to top off the pond and shut off automatically with a float valve when the pond is full.  A garden hose adapter (see below) will allow the user to produce RO water from a garden hose.

Final rinse water for a spot-free car wash. The water for car washing is usually captured in a small tank, then pumped to provide pressure for the car wash. A deionizing cartridge can be added to provide zero-TDS water if desired.  The standard countertop RO unit can make up to 50 gallons of RO water per day (and it can be easily modified to produce more).  The pump setup is easy to make from standard water treatment parts.

High quality water for plants, either in small outdoor gardens or greenhouses. This application also requires capturing then pumping the water to the point of use, although small drip systems can be designed that take water directly from the RO unit.  For small operations, the water can be produced into a small tank and then dipped out with a bucket or pitcher to water plants.

High quality water for dehumidifiers or other appliances that require water that  does not leave mineral deposits. Again, it is easy to modify the RO unit so that it feeds water to the appliance upon demand.

This handy fitting screws onto the end of a garden hose or outdoor faucet to make an easy connection to a countertop RO unit.  It is provided free for the asking when a Black and White countertop RO unit is purchased.

More about Countertop RO Units.

Study: 270,000 tons of plastic floating in oceans

by Audrey McAvoy

A new study estimates nearly 270,000 tons of plastic is floating in the world’s oceans. That’s enough to fill more than 38,500 garbage trucks.

The plastic is broken up into more than 5 trillion pieces, said the study published Wednesday in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.

The paper is the latest in a nascent field where scientists are trying to better understand how much of the synthetic material is entering the oceans and how it’s affecting fish, seabirds and the larger marine ecosystem.

The study’s lead author is Markus Eriksen of the 5 Gyres Institute, an organization that aims to reduce plastic in the oceans.

To gather data, researchers dragged a fine mesh net at the sea surface to gather small pieces. Observers on boats counted larger items. They used computer models to calculate estimates for tracts of ocean not surveyed.

The study only measured plastic floating at the surface. Plastic on the ocean floor wasn’t included.

Bits greater than about 8 inches accounted for three-quarters of the plastic that the research estimated is in the ocean.

Kara Lavender Law of the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, who wasn’t involved in the study, said the researchers gathered data in areas where scientists currently don’t have measurements for floating plastic debris, including the Indian Ocean, the Southern Ocean near Antarctica and the South Atlantic.

In addition, the study’s estimate for tiny plastic bits less than one-fifth of an inch — about 35,540 tons — is comparable to an earlier study by researchers in Spain who used different methodology, Law said. That study estimated there was 7,000 to 35,000 tons of plastics this size floating in the ocean.

It’s encouraging that two different approaches came up with such similar answers, given how difficult it is to measure plastic in the ocean, she said.

Studying the amount of plastic in the ocean will help scientists understand how the material will affect the environment and potentially the food chain.

For example, Law said, we might eat tuna that has ingested another fish that has eaten plastic that has in turn eaten another fish with plastic. These plastics could potentially have toxic chemicals.

“Am I being poisoned by eating the fish on my plate?” she asked. “We have very little knowledge of the chain of events that could lead to that. But it’s a plausible scenario that plastic ingested at lower levels of the food web could have consequences at higher levels of the food chain.”

Source: Poughkeepsie Journal.

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What Happens to All the Salt We Dump On the Roads?

In the U.S., road crews scatter about 137 pounds of salt per person annually to melt ice. Where does it go after that?

by Joseph Stromberg

As much of the country endures from the heavy snowfall and bitter cold that has marked the start of 2014, municipalities in 26 states will rely on a crucial tool in clearing their roads: salt.

Because the freezing point of salty water is a lower temperature than pure water, scattering some salt atop ice or snow can help accelerate the melting process, opening up the roads to traffic that much sooner. It’s estimated that more than 22 million tons of salt are scattered on the roads of the U.S. annually—about 137 pounds of salt for every American.

But all that salt has to go somewhere. After it dissolves—and is split into sodium and chloride ions—it gets carried away via runoff and deposited into both surface water (streams, lakes and rivers) and the groundwater under our feet.

Consider how easily salt can corrode your car. Unsurprisingly, it’s also a problem for the surrounding environment—so much that in 2004, Canada categorized road salt as a toxin and placed new guidelines on its use. And as more and more of the U.S. becomes urbanized and suburbanized, and as a greater number of roads criss-cross the landscape, the mounting piles of salt we dump on them may be getting to be a bigger problem than ever.

Data from long-term studies of watersheds bear this out. A group of scientists that tracked salt levels from 1952 to 1998 in the Mohawk River in Upstate New York, for instance, found that concentrations of sodium and chloride increased by 130 and 243 percent, respectively, with road salting the primary reason as the surround area became more developed. More recently, a study of a stream in southeastern New York State that was monitored from 1986 to 2005 found a similar pattern, with significant annual increases and road salting to blame for an estimated 91 percent of sodium chloride in the watershed.

Because it’s transported more easily than sodium, chloride is the greater concern, and in total, an estimated 40 percent of the country’s urban streams have chloride levels that exceed safe guidelines for aquatic life, largely because of road salt. 

This chloride can occasionally impact human water use, mostly because some penetrates into the groundwater we tap for drinking purposes. Water utilities most frequently report complaints of salty drinking water during the winter, when chloride concentrations are likely to exceed 250 parts per million (ppm), our tastebuds’ threshold for detecting it. This is an especially big issue for people on salt restrictive diets. Overall, though, road salt-laced drinking water isn’t a widespread problem: A 2009 USGS study found that fewer than 2 percent of the drinking wells sampled had chloride levels that surpassed federal standards.

Road salt pollution is generally a bigger issue for the surrounding environment and the organisms that live in it. It’s estimated that chloride concentrations above 800 ppm are harmful to most freshwater aquatic organisms—because these high levels interfere with how animals regulate the uptake of salt into their bodies—and for short periods after a snow melt, wetlands nearby highways can surpass these levels. A range of studies has found that chloride from road salt can negatively impact the survival rates of crustaceans, amphibians such as salamanders and frogs, fish, plants and other organisms. There’s even some evidence that it could hasten invasions of non-native plant species—in one marsh by the Massachusetts Turnpike, a study found that it aided the spread of salt-tolerant invasives.

On a broader scale, elevated salt concentrations can reduce water circulation in lakes and ponds (because salt affects water’s density), preventing oxygen from reaching bottom layers of water. It can also interfere with a body of water’s natural chemistry, reducing the overall nutrient load. On a smaller scale, highly concentrated road salt can dehydrate and kill trees and plants growing next to roadways, creating desert conditions because the plants have so much more difficulty absorbing water. In some cases, dried salt crystals can attract deer and moose to busy roads, increasing their chance of becoming roadkill.

How can we avoid killing trees and making roadkill of deer while de-icing the roads? Recently, in some areas, transportation departments have begun pursuing strategies to reduce salt use. Salting before a storm, instead of after, can prevent snow and ice from binding to the asphalt, making the post-storm cleanup a little bit easier and allowing road crews to use less salt overall. Mixing the salt with slight amounts of water allows it to spread more, and blending in sand or gravel lets it to stick more easily and improve traction for cars.

Elsewhere, municipalities are trying out alternate de-icing compounds. Over the past few years, beet juice, sugarcane molasses and cheese brine, among other substances, have been mixed in with salt to reduce the overall chloride load on the environment. These don’t eliminate the need for conventional salt, but they could play a role in cutting down just how much we dump on the roads.

Source: Smithsonian.com

Whole House Reverse Osmosis

by Gene Franks

A residential whole house reverse osmosis unit consists of more than just the reverse osmosis unit itself.  Usually, some pretreatment will be needed, a  storage tank is required, and the water will then have to be post-treated and pumped into the home.

The Reverse Osmosis Unit

There are many excellent residential whole house reverse osmosis units on the market. They are usually classified according to the number of gallons per day of “permeate” (finished water)  they are rated to produce.  GPD ratings are purely theoretical: the actual production depends on the nature and conditions of the treated water. TDS (total dissolved solids), for example, affects production rates considerably, as does water temperature.  When furnished a detailed water analysis for the water to be processed,  RO manufacturers will usually perform an analysis called a ROSA test that gives a fairly accurate prediction of the actual production and the quality of the finished product.

Axeon AT Series RO Unit.  Units in this series produce in the 500 to 1000 gallon-per-day range. When you get the unit, it has been run and tested–it’s ready to install and use.

Typical GPD sizes for residential RO units are 500, 1000, 1500, and even more.  Sizing adequately is important, and over-sizing a little doesn’t hurt.  A lot more capacity than you need, however, is not good for the equipment.  RO thrives on work and it’s better for the equipment to run several hours per day than to make an occasional short run and shut off.  Consider your household needs.  Unless you have special uses like extensive irrigation, about 75 gallons per day per person is usually enough. Keep in mind, however, that you might get only 200 gallons of actual output from a 500 gallon unit and the unit might have to run virtually continuously to keep up with the demand,  so a 1000 GPD unit might be a better choice for a two-person home than a 500.  In most cases, too,  1000 costs only a bit more than 500,  and larger units are usually more efficient than small ones.

Pretreatment

Reverse osmosis can tame some very challenging water by reducing dissolved solids levels by almost 100% and removing arsenic, nitrates, and lead, and other problem contaminants, but the RO membranes themselves must be protected from contaminants like iron, hardness, manganese, turbidity, silica, and chlorine.  Pretreatment can require an iron filter, a water softener, sediment filtration and/or chemical scale inhibitors. Pretreatment is not optional.  Although the RO unit can itself remove the calcium that causes hardness scaling, untreated hardness will eventually scale the membrane, and membrane replacement is costly. Keep that in mind when considering a whole house RO installation.  Consider, too, that iron filters and softeners have to be allowed some time to regenerate themselves when the RO unit is not running.  This can affect sizing.

Filters and/or softeners may be needed to pre-treat water for iron, hardness, sediment–anything that can damage the reverse osmosis membrane.

Post Treatment

RO water is naturally low in pH, so it often a good idea to send it through a small neutralizing filter (usually calcite) to bump the pH back into the 7 range. This protects plumbing fixtures and can make the water more aesthetically pleasing.  Also, after the water has been stored in a tank,  a small carbon postfilter will improve the taste.  Finally, an ultraviolet lamp can assure safe, bacteria-free water.  Calcite, carbon filters, and UV are all optional, but you should consider them seriously.

Delivery System

Reverse osmosis units make water slowly, so storage is necessary to assure that enough water will be on hand for domestic needs.  The standard whole house RO storage vessel is a plastic, un-pressurized (atmospheric) tank.  The RO unit produces water into the tank; when the tank is full, a float valve turns off the RO unit.  When the water level drops, the float valve restarts the RO unit to refill the tank. To send water to the home, a delivery pump is used.  Some modern pumps (Grundfos is the leading brand) require no pump tank and send a smooth surge of water to the home when a faucet is opened or an appliance asks for water.

Common tank sizes are 165, 300, 500, and 1000 gallons.  A 300 gallon tank is plenty big for most domestic RO installations.  Keep in mind that if your RO unit is a high producer, you can get by with a smaller storage tank.  Typically, RO tanks need 4 holes.  One on the side near the bottom from which water is sent to the home, one for the float valve, one for RO water to enter the tank,  and one to serve as an overflow safety device in case the float valve fails to turn off the RO unit. The last three holes are near the top of the tank.

One More Thing

Something people often fail to think about when they consider installing whole house reverse osmosis is the brine, or “waste water.”  There will normally be a lot of it. You’re almost certain to have at least as much brine to get rid of as good water to use. You probably won’t want to put it into a septic tank.  What you’re going to do with the brine is something you should work out before you purchase a whole house RO unit.

Let’s Bring Back Bottle Messaging

by Tiger Tom

Gazette Social Critic Tiger Tom Speaks Out on the Lost Art of Message-in-a-Bottle Communication

One of the great forms of human communication, putting a written message into a bottle and tossing it into a body of water,  has been on the decline in recent years and I, for one, would like to see it come back.  That message-in-a-bottle communication has been eclipsed by smoke signals, pony express, telephones, email, text-messaging and other such fads is understandable to a degree, since these methods have a few advantages.  But I feel bottle tossing has redeeming qualities that we should reconsider.

The origins of bottle messaging are obscure, the only thing certain being that the practice did not develop before the invention of bottles that were light enough to float.  Messaging with stone bottles never got popular.  The first glass bottles were produced around 1500 B.C., and it’s hard to understand how someone didn’t immediately launch a bottle message;  but it is generally believed that the first known messages in bottles were released around 310 BC by the Ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus as part of an experiment to show that the Mediterranean Sea was formed by the inflowing  Atlantic Ocean.

Bottle messaging was widely used by the time of Columbus,  who tossed a bottled message addressed to Queen Isabel into the ocean when he feared his ship might not make it through a storm.  The message has not surfaced to this day.  Finding it would be a big event and the message would certainly fetch big bucks on Ebay.

In the 16th century, bottle messages were used by the English navy and others to send strategic information to government officials; these were viewed as so important that Queen Elizabeth decreed the death penalty for unauthorized un-corking of bottled messages.  Hacking of personal messages was taken seriously then as now.

One thing that held bottle messaging back in earlier times was the high cost of bottles. It wasn’t until 1903 that the first automatic glass blowing machine was invented and glass bottles became ubiquitous and cheap. Before that, bottles were expensive and only the well-off could afford bottle messaging, even when shipwrecked or otherwise in dire straits.

Who, I’m sure you’re asking, holds the record for the oldest tossed-bottle message in existence? Since Theophrastus’ and Columbus’ offerings are still out there, the record goes to Richard Platz, who on a nature trail along the German Baltic Coast wrote a message on a postcard, put it in a beer bottle, corked it, and pitched it into the Baltic. That was in 1913.  The message was found by fishermen 97 years later.   The message, which wasn’t profound or in any way important in itself, leading to no buried treasure and revealing no long-forgotten secret,  somehow survived world wars, innumerable storms, and rocks thrown by boys for a century.

Richard Platz’ message.  Posted in a beer bottle on May 17, 1913 and found by German fishermen in 2012–97 years after it was sent via the Baltic Sea.

Not all messages are without consequence.  In May 2005 eighty-eight shipwrecked migrants were rescued off the coast of Costa Rica. They had placed an SOS message in a bottle and tied it to one of the long lines of a passing fishing boat. Good thing for them that the age-old art of communication via message in a bottle is still alive.

Bottled-message Technology Is Not Dead

In case you think message-in-a-bottle technology is obsolete, consider the familiar pneumatic tube that we use every day in banks and many other venues.  The pneumatic tube is clearly nothing more than a modern-day adaptation of the old message-in-a-bottle technology.  I, Tiger Tom, declare that without the pioneering bottle tossers from Theophrastus on, the modern pneumatic tube would not have been invented and bank tellers would be delivering cash to drive-through customers on roller skates.

Advantages of Bottle Messaging

It’s clear that communication via bottle-encapsulated letters has some limitations. It’s usually pretty slow, it’s hard to target accurately, and it doesn’t work well at all in rivers unless the addressee is downstream.  Also, it is excruciatingly slow during winter in cold climates.

But it also has advantages.  The cost is low, with no transit fees and product cost if recycled paper and bottles are used. No taxes. Bottle-messaging is also very low-tech and easy to learn, with no passwords, encrypting, or software upgrades to contend with. No batteries required.  Although you can write anything you want in a bottle message, the format does not encourage stupidities like LOL  and OMG.  That’s because when you write for the bottled delivery system you are aware that your message might be read 97 years hence, so the gravity of the situation demands that the writer show a bit more class than would be expected in a texted message telling a friend that you’re waiting in line at the supermarket. The message that Richard Platz sent, for example, was eventually delivered to his granddaughter. Imagine how you’d feel if your great-grandson, not even born yet, were to get from his great grandma a silly epistle peppered with OMGs and NBDs.

Also, consider the health advantages of the message-in-a-bottle system.  Not only does it get you off your rump and away from the computer, it requires you to walk to the lake or river to post the message, then make a daily return, probably for the rest of your life, to walk the shore looking for your answer. Sending one message could turn into a life-long exercise program.

And consider environmental  advantages which include no greenhouse gas emissions and a carbon footprint of zero. The revival of bottled messaging could provide a valid reuse for the countless used catsup bottles that go to the dumps daily. Remember that reuse is better than recycling.

Finally,  just think how much saner our world would be if mad politicians gave up Twitter and posted their random ravings via bottles in the sea.