Want to know what’s clogging your commercial RO membranes? The next time your RO stops producing water, try using your senses to determine why.
Smell:Does the membrane have a fishy or moldy odor when removed from the housing? If it does it’s likely that bacteria/bio film is present. Cut the membrane lengthwise and unroll it like a roll of paper towels.
Feel: The membrane material should feel like clean wet plastic. If there’s slime or a slippery film present it means the membrane could be bio-fouled. If the membrane’s texture feels like sand paper it means a mineral fouling is present.
To test mineral fouling, unroll and dry a sample of membrane, scrape up a sample of the mineral, put it into a beaker, and soak it in RO water with a pH of 4 (adjusted with muratic acid) for one hour. Then readjust the pH back to 7 with baking soda and use a field kit to test for hardness and/or iron. Is hardness present? If yes, your softener isn’t working all the time. Then scrape up a second sample of scale and put a drop of vinegar on it. If it foams it is carbonate; if not it could be sulfate.
Sight: Is there discoloration on the membrane surface? A red/brown discoloration indicates possible iron fouling while grey/brown indicates possible silt fouling.
Authorities in Portland, Ore. have discovered detectable levels of gluten in the city’s water supply, causing a citywide panic.
The city’s water bureau discovered the contamination yesterday and is desperately trying to find out how gluten got into the water. A preliminary report found that the contamination may have occurred “at least eight or nine months ago” when a child dropped a loaf of bread into a local river.
Officials have declared a state of emergency and plan to drain all of the city’s reservoirs. The mayor has also deployed city’s spiritual and wellness counselors to provide relief to beleaguered residents who drank the gluten-contaminated water.
“I haven’t seen anything like this since the Tofu Crisis of ‘08, when we discovered that the Pacific Northwest’s entire supply of tofu had been prepared alongside bacon,” said city engineer Bryce Shivers. “I imagine we’re going to be seeing the disastrous effects of this on the city for decades, like higher rates of obesity, cancer, brain damage and illiteracy.
“Or whatever it is that gluten does. Frankly, I have no idea. My Hot Yoga guru just gave me a brochure.”
Make it grain (free)
Gluten, a type of protein in wheats and certain grains, is found in numerous products including flour, pasta, pastries, beer, cereal, salad dressings and lip balm.
Although gluten-free food is recommended for people with celiac disease, it has become a fad diet for many, including millions in trendier-than-thou Portland. Gluten-free foods are becoming mainstream throughout the U.S. — even though very few consumers can explain what gluten is or why they think it’s bad.
“This is the worst news I’ve ever heard,” Portland resident Steve Arlo said as he sat drinking a microbrew made with barley and rye. “It’s like being told they dumped fluoride into the water supply. Wait! Have they dumped fluoride into the water supply?”
Dex Parios said she started her gluten-free diet “before anyone ever heard of it.” Now depressed by the news about the gluten, she is concerned that Portland is losing its reputation for livability and alternative lifestyles.
“When I moved here after getting my master’s degree in order to work part time at a record store, I thought Portland was a haven for intelligent, well-educated and cultured people,” she said. “But it’s so dangerous. Our leaders can’t even protect us from chemtrails, cell phone towers, bark dust fires, Republicans, people trying to talk to you, and now gluten outbreaks. It’s becoming like Baghdad or Afghanistan day by day.
“If I want to live in a city filled with provincial, arrogant, short-sighted morons, I’ll move to Gresham.”
Despite the paranoia gripping Portland’s streets, not all scientists are convinced by the city’s analysis and believe the water bureau has made a grave error.
“Gluten is not soluble in water, so it’s extremely unlikely to be found in tap water,” says Dr. Chaz Friday of Portland State University. “Nevertheless, just to be on the safe side perhaps hipsters with gluten-sensitivity should move to Seattle instead.”
Small disposable inline water filters provide an easy way to add a water filter almost anywhere. They can be used as stand-alone filters or can be added to existing filters.
Typical uses:
Refrigerator filter, to remove chlorine or chloramine from city water.
Add-on filter, to raise the pH or add mineral content to water from an undersink reverse osmosis unit.
Add-on filter to protect an existing undersink filter or RO unit from sediment.
The final or “polishing” stage of an undersink reverse osmosis unit.
An inexpensive independent undersink filter to improve taste and odor of city tap water.
The most common format for small inlines today is with quick connect (a.k.a. John Guest) fittings, but they can still be installed with plastic compression fittings (Jaco style) or conventional copper compression fittings. They come in 6″ length, 10″, and larger. By far the most popular size is the 10″. They can be installed with inexpensive clips, or they be laid on the floor, or even, because of their light weight, installed on a vertical tube like an undersink faucet line without additional support.
Here are the fitting styles available.
The filter above has what is currently the most popular connection method. The 1/4″ quick connect above is used widely for refrigerator filters and reverse osmosis postfilters. Simply push in the tube until it “hits bottom” and the connection is made. This filter comes from the factory with quick connect fittings built in. These are virtually leak proof when used with plastic tubing because when the filter is replaced, the fitting is also replaced. To release, press in on the collet (the red ring) with your thumbnail or other release tool and pull the tube out. These fittings can be used with copper tubing, but they work much better with plastic. The fitting in the picture is a straight-in fitting, but you can make a 90 degree fitting easily by using a socalled a plug-in elbow:
The same filters can be purchased with female threads. Below is a standard 1/4″ threaded filter:
The threaded filter can be used either with quick connect filters added. with “Jaco” plastic compression fittings, or with standard hardware-store grade metal compression fittings. Just telflon tape the threaded portion of the fitting and screw it into the filter.
Metal Compression Fitting
Quick Connect Elbow
Jaco Plastic Compression Fitting
Inline filters can serve as stand-alone taste/odor/chemical filters. They can raise the pH of acidic water. They can protect appliances like coffee makers and ice machines. They can remove lead and heavy metals. They can remove sediment. Carbon inlines come with standard GAC, coconut shell GAC, and in several carbon block styles.
World Oceans Day 2014: World’s Most Polluted Seas Revealed
By Ludovica Iaccino
Sunday 8 June is World Oceans Day, an event to raise global awareness about threats to the oceans and promote marine conservation. The special day has been recognised by the United Nations since 2008.
According to World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), more than 80% of marine pollution is caused by land-based activities that cause oil spills, fertilisers and toxic chemical runoff and the discharge of untreated sewage.
Some water pollution starts also as air pollution, which settles into waterways and oceans, according to the United States’ National Ocean Service.
More than 80% of marine pollution is caused by land-based activities.
IBTimes UK looks at the most polluted oceans areas and seas in the world.
Atlantic Ocean – Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone
The Gulf of Mexico is a basin in the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the gulf coast of the United States, Mexico and Cuba.
The dead zone here is one of the largest in the world.
Its waters are full of nitrogen and phosphorous that come from major farming states in the Mississippi River Valley, including Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana.
The presence of these chemicals frequently turns Gulf of Mexico waters hypoxic, or low in oxygen.
Hypoxia kills fish in huge numbers.
“Hypoxia in bottom waters covered an average of 8,000–9,000 km2 in 1985–92 but increased to 16,000–20,000 km2 in 1993–99,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Atlantic Ocean – North Atlantic Garbage Patch
This patch was first documented in 1972 and is entirely composed of man-made marine debris floating in the North Atlantic Gyre.
Pacific Ocean – Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Located in the northern Pacific Ocean, near the North Pacific Gyre, this collection of marine debris is largely composed of plastic and chemical sludge.
This patch is believed to have formed gradually as marine pollution was brought together by ocean currents.
The exact size of the patch is unknown, but estimates range from 700,000 sq km (270,000 sq miles) to more than 15 million sq km (5.8 million sq miles). Because the floating debris is largely composed of microscopic pieces of plastic, it is invisible from space.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch collects marine debris from North America and Asia, as well as ships travelling through the area.
Rubbish from the coast of North America takes about six years to reach the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, while detritus from Japan and other Asian countries takes about a year.
Indian Ocean
A garbage patch in the Indian Ocean was discovered in 2010. This patch, mainly formed by plastic debris and chemical sludge, is the third major collection of plastic garbage in the world’s oceans.
According to the Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX), the Indian Ocean is gravely polluted by plastic debris and chemical runoff, resulting in hypoxia.
INDOEX has documented widespread pollution covering about 10 million sq km (3.86 million sq miles).
Mediterranean Sea
The Mediterranean is probably the most polluted ocean in the world.
The United Nations Environment Programme has estimated that 650,000,000 tons of sewage, 129,000 tons of mineral oil, 60,000 tons of mercury, 3,800 tons of lead and 36,000 tons of phosphates are dumped into the Mediterranean each year.
Because it is so enclosed by land, the warm waters of the Mediterranean take more than 100 years to clean and renew themselves, according to Greenpeace.
Due to the high rates of pollution, many marine species are at risk of extinction, among them the Mediterranean Monk Seal, one of the world’s most endangered marine mammals.
Baltic Sea
Overfishing, oil spills and land-based pollution are high threats to the Baltic Sea, situated between Central and Eastern Europe.
Drought-stricken farmers in the Central Valley are pumping more and more water from the valley’s huge aquifer beneath them, and the drainage is triggering unexpected earthquakes along the San Andreas Fault, scientists have discovered.
For the past 150 years, they report, periodic pumping from the aquifer has caused the towering Sierra to rebound upward as much as 150 millimeters, or about 6 inches. At the same time, they note, California’s Coast Range, which spans 400 miles from Humboldt to Santa Barbara counties, has grown, although by much less.
The pace of uplift in the Sierra is measured only in millimeters, but when California experienced bone-dry seasons between 2003 and 2010 and pumping increased up and down the Central Valley, the High Sierra rose by about 10 millimeters, the geophysicists say. That’s nearly half an inch during those seven years alone.
During that same period of increased pumping, instruments at Parkfield in Monterey County detected unusual clusters of earthquakes along the quake-prone San Andreas Fault there.
The unexpected links between the periodic drainage of the Central Valley’s aquifer and the rise of the mountains that increase stresses on the San Andreas fault zone are reported in the May issue of the journal Nature.
The remarkable ability to measure tiny changes in the height of mountains is made possible by the extraordinary sensitivity of advanced global positioning systems, similar in principle to the GPS devices that tell car drivers where they’re going in unfamiliar cities, block by block.
Hammond and his colleagues at the Nevada Seismological Laboratory regularly analyze signs of the Earth’s movements from more than 12,000 GPS stations around the world. For this study, the team focused on 566 stations in California and Nevada.
“The whole Earth is elastic,” Hammond said, “and when it moves even slightly we can measure it.”
Amos, the study’s lead author, explained the connections.
“As winter snows melt and rains fill the aquifer each year, the enormous weight of the water pushes the Earth’s crust downward beneath both the valley and the mountains,” he said. “Then as pumping drains the aquifer, particularly in dry years, the crust springs upward – mountains, valleys and all – and the rocks rebound like elastic.”
Amos calculated that the amount of water pumped from the great aquifer since 1860 would be enormous, weighing roughly 175 billion tons, more than enough to fill Lake Tahoe.
‘Real eye-opener’
“The periodic stress on earthquake faults would be very small, but in some circumstances even such small stress changes can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” Bürgmann said. “The stresses from the rebounding mountains would give just that extra force needed to unclamp the (San Andreas) fault and encourage, not only small earthquakes, but also larger ruptures to occur.”
“This is a real eye-opener,” said James Famiglietti, a water resource expert and director of the UC Center for Hydrologic Modeling at UC Irvine who has long studied the great aquifer’s long-term drainage issues and its seasonal water losses. He called the study’s conclusions surprising and valid.
“The whole role of fluids and seismicity is still poorly understood. They have identified a real link between human activity and earthquakes,” said Famiglietti, who was not part of the study.
“It forces us to consider not only the role that large groundwater mass changes can play in earthquake frequency, but by extension, the roles of water management decisions in times of drought and climate change.”
Nation’s largest ocean desalination plant goes up near San Diego; Future of the California coast?
by Paul Rogers
Racks containing reverse osmosis components at the $1 billion Carlsbad desalination plant in Carlsbad, California. When completed in 2016, it will be the largest desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere and will produce 50 million gallons per day.
CARLSBAD — On sunny afternoons, this stretch of beach 35 miles north of San Diego offers a classic So uthern California backdrop: joggers, palm trees and surfers, flanked by waves rolling in and pelicans soaring overhead.
But just across the road, another scene, unlike any other in the state’s history, is playing out: More than 300 construction workers are digging trenches and assembling a vast network of pipes, tanks and high-tech equipment as three massive yellow cranes labor nearby.
The crews are building what boosters say represents California’s best hope for a drought-proof water supply: the largest ocean desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere. The $1 billion project will provide 50 million gallons of drinking water a day for San Diego County when it opens in 2016.
Since the 1970s, California has dipped its toe into ocean desalination –talking, planning, debating. But for a variety of reasons — mainly cost and environmental concerns– the state has never taken the plunge.
Until now.
Fifteen desalination projects are proposed along the coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco Bay. Desalination technology is becoming more efficient. And the state is mired in its third year of drought. Critics and backers alike are wondering whether this project in a town better known as the home of Legoland and skateboard icon Tony Hawk is ushering in a new era.
Will California — like Israel, Saudi Arabia and other arid coastal regions of the world — finally turn to the ocean to quench its thirst? Or will the project finally prove that drinking Pacific seawater is too pricey, too environmentally harmful and too impractical for the Golden State?
“Everybody is watching Carlsbad to see what’s going to happen,” said Peter MacLaggan, vice president of Poseidon Water, the Boston firm building the plant.
“I think it will be a growing trend along the coast,” he said. “The ocean is the one source of water that’s truly drought-proof. And it will always be there.”
To supporters, the Carlsbad Desalination Plant is a historic engineering marvel. And it is a survivor, having endured six years of government permitting, from the Carlsbad City Council to the California Coastal Commission. Supporters won 14 lawsuits and appeals by environmentalists before finally breaking ground in December 2012.
“They went through seven or eight years of hell to get here,” said Tim Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies. “But they stuck it out. They got it done. If it succeeds, it will encourage others to try. And if it fails, it will have a chilling effect.”
To critics, the plant is a costly mistake that will use huge amounts of energy and harm fish and other marine life when it sucks in seawater using the intakes from the aging Encina Power Plant next door.
“This is going to be the pig that will try for years to find the right shade of lipstick,” said Marco Gonzalez, an Encinitas attorney who sued on behalf of the Surfrider Foundation and other environmental groups to try to stop construction. “This project will show that the water is just too expensive.”
For the plant to be a success and copied in other parts of the state, Poseidon will have to deliver high-quality drinking water at the price promised — and not cause unexpected impacts to the environment such as fish die-offs.
“It’s a test case,” said Ron Davis, executive director of Cal Desal, an industry advocacy group. “We like to tease them: Only the entire future of desal is riding on this project. No pressure.”
High cost
Almost every discussion about desalination begins and ends with cost.
Desalinated water typically costs about $2,000 an acre foot — roughly the amount of water a family of five uses in a year. The cost is about double that of water obtained from building a new reservoir or recycling wastewater, according to a 2013 study from the state Department of Water Resources.
And its price tag is at least four times the cost of obtaining “new water” from conservation methods — such as paying farmers to install drip irrigation, or providing rebates for homeowners to rip out lawns or buy water-efficient toilets.
“We look out and see a vast ocean. It seems obvious,” said Heather Cooley, water director for the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit research organization in Oakland. “But it’s cost prohibitive for most places in California.”
In Carlsbad, two gallons of seawater will be needed to produce each gallon of drinking water. And to remove the salt, the plant will use an enormous amount of energy — about 38 megawatts, enough to power 28,500 homes — to force 100 million gallons of seawater a day through a series of filters. The process, known as reverse osmosis, removes salt and other impurities by blasting the water at six times the pressure of a fire hose through membranes with microscopic holes.
San Diego County is better suited than any large California community for desalination. It receives only 10 inches of rain a year, one-third less than Los Angeles, Fresno or San Jose. It has very little groundwater. And it has a large customer base to spread out the cost of the Carlsbad plant, which will provide about 7 percent of the total water needs of the county.
The high price is worth it to help San Diego and other regions rely less on water from the Colorado River and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, both of which are overdrawn and increasingly unreliable, said Bob Yamada, water resources manager for the San Diego County Water Authority.
“You can’t conserve or recycle what you don’t have,” Yamada said.
“Desal offers us local control.”
The authority will pay from $2,014 to $2,257 an acre foot for the water, depending on how much it buys. The agency, which provides water to 3.1 million people in San Diego County, signed a 30-year contract agreeing to buy at least 48,000 acre feet a year.
With that guarantee, Poseidon and its investors were able to sell bonds to finance the project. The company will be guaranteed a rate of return between 9 and 13 percent, depending on operating costs.
Critics say the agency is getting a raw deal.
“It’s not a public-private partnership,” Gonzalez said. “It’s corporate welfare.”
Nobody disputes that the cost of water will go up. According to Yamada, the average customer’s bill, now $71 a month, will rise $5 to $7 to pay for desalination.
Santa Barbara redux?
Sometimes the high costs can turn off the spigot.
After enduring severe water shortages during a drought in the late 1980s, Santa Barbara voters agreed to spend $34 million to build a desalination plant. It opened in 1991 and provided water for four months. When the drought ended, the city shut it down. Water from reservoirs and other sources was significantly cheaper.
Similarly, Australia spent more than $10 billion building six huge seawater desalination plants during a severe drought from 1997 to 2009. Today, Cooley noted, four are shut down because when rains finally came, the cost of the water became noncompetitive.
“We run the risk of building facilities that we don’t use,” Cooley said. “And that’s a waste of money.”
Earlier this month, the Santa Barbara City Council voted to spend $935,000 to hire an engineering firm, law firm and lobbyist to try to restart the city’s shuttered plant by 2016.
“None of us wants to do it, but I was there 25 years ago, and it’s really ugly when you run out of water,” said Santa Barbara City Councilman Harwood “Bendy” White. “This is one option for stretching out our supplies.”
Monterey County
Similarly, the California American Water Company in Monterey County is studying three locations to build a desal plant to make up for water lost when state regulators ruled the company didn’t have valid permits for the Carmel River. In Los Angeles, leaders of the West Basin Municipal Water District, which serves about 100,000 people, built a pilot plant in Redondo Beach and are studying plans for a $300 million desalination plant by 2020.
Desal technology continues to improve. It now takes only a quarter of the electricity to generate drinking water as it did in the 1980s because of more efficient pumps, membranes and energy-recovery devices, said Tom Pankratz, editor of the Water Desalination Report, a newsletter based in Houston.
But some places are balking.
Santa Cruz city officials in August shelved plans for a desal plant after environmental activists raised fears that the new water might trigger more growth. Marin County studied a desal project, then dropped it when water use declined. Long-running plans to build a desal plant in San Francisco Bay near Concord were shelved this year when the region’s largest water districts decided they could obtain water more cheaply through recycling and other means.
Another key issue looming large is how to get the seawater without hurting the marine environment.
The Coastal Commission approved the Carlsbad plant and its open-ocean intake system. But new scientific studies and changing laws mean that most future plants probably will be required to bury intake pipes and pump water at a lower rate to reduce impacts on fish and the millions of larvae, eggs and other sea life that can be killed.
“These organisms become things — like fish — and we always have to be careful of the perspective that ‘Oh, this is just one little piece,'” said Charles Lester, executive director of the Coastal Commission. “It all adds up.”
Plans by Poseidon to build a desalination plant in Huntington Beach slowed last year when the Coastal Commission said it wanted the company to investigate whether its pipes could be buried, a prospect that will increase costs. For the Carlsbad plant Poseidon was required to build 66 acres of wetlands in San Diego Bay to offset the plant’s environmental harm. It also must blend its brine at a 5:1 ratio with other seawater before flushing it back into the ocean so it won’t harm marine life. Other projects will have to do all those things to get state permits.
But some experts say the plants are coming anyway.
“In the next 10 years you are probably going to have three big plants built in Southern California and another plant or two in Northern California,” Pankratz said. “The trend is toward more desal. They are the most reasonable insurance policy against a long, protracted drought.”
Garden hoses are a hot commodity these days as gardeners get their vegetables and flowers in the ground, but should we drink from them?
Kevin Hurst is assistant manager of a Lee Valley Tools in Halifax, Nova Scotia, he said most people don’t read the fine print when they pick out a hose.
“On the back here, [there’s] a warning, ‘this product contains one or more chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects'”.
“I certainly wouldn’t let my kid, or any kid that I knew drink from a hose, it’s a completely unnecessary risk,” said Gideon Foreman, the Toronto, Ontario based executive director of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment.
“One of the concerns certainly around the garden hose is they are not meant to go into a child’s mouth,” he explained. “They’re not meant to be drunk from … they’re not regulated, and there is some danger that the chemicals in the hose, just like other plastics, can leach.
Many Garden Hose Manufacturers Now Market the Safety of Their Product
A non-profit research group in the U.S. called The Ecology Center decided to study which chemicals might be leaching into water being ingested by kids and sprayed on fruit and vegetable gardens.
Last year it tested 21 brands and models of hoses. Lead researcher Jeff Gearhart said they found a range of chemicals, including lead, leaching from those hoses.
“The level of phthalate plasticizers that leached into the water [were] four times higher than drinking water standards, and bisphenol A, which is another chemical we’re worried about, was 20 times higher than drinking water standards that are commonly used to measure water safety.”
The research found that hoses made with PVC and vinyl tended to leach more phthalates and BPA, while those with copper fittings were the worst for lead content.
Health Canada has also weighed in on this. The agency recommends people not drink from hoses, because in addition to the risk of leaching chemicals, dirt, bacteria and small insects can also present a health risk. In an email, a Health Canada spokesperson also suggested that people flush the hose thoroughly with cold water to remove material that may have accumulated in the standing water.
Nicole Mensour lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia with her two children, aged nine and seven. She said she’s not going to stop her kids from taking a drink out of the garden hose.
“I grew up and we all drank from the garden hose, none of us died from it,” she said. “It’s not like they’re drinking from it every day and filling up their water bottles … so it must be minimal.”
Still, the federal government is cracking down on chemicals like phthalates and BPA, banning or limiting them from a range of consumer products.
The California-based Ecology Center recommends you:
Store your hose in the shade to prevent leaching.
Choose a hose made of natural rubber or polyurethane.
New Technology Extracts Water for Cattle from Manure
EAST LANSING, Mich. — A technology for extracting drinkable water from manure is on its way to commercial application this year, Michigan State University said Thursday.
The technology is particularly useful for animal operations in dry regions where water is at a premium, the school said.
The McLanahan Nutrient Separation System is an add-on to an anaerobic digester, which extracts energy and chemicals from manure. The system adds ultrafiltration, air stripping and a reverse osmosis system to produce water that’s clean enough for cattle to drink.
This unspectacular pile of cow manure can is 90% water. One thing that America has is plenty of cow manure. It may become a significant source of water for animals (and people?).
The system has value both in conserving resources and protecting the environment, said Steve Safferman, an associate professor of biosystems and agricultural engineering who is working on the project.
“If you have 1,000 cows on your operation, they produce about 10 million gallons of manure a year,” Safferman said in a statement. “Here in Michigan we have a tendency to take water for granted,” said Safferman. “But out west, for example, where drought remains an issue, the accessibility of clean water could make the difference between a farm remaining viable or going out of business.”
Manure also “contains large amounts of nutrients, carbon and pathogens that can have an environmental impact if not properly managed,” said Safferman.
A particular issue is ammonia “that would otherwise be lost in the atmosphere,” said Jim Wallace, a former Michigan State student now employed by McLanahan Corp., which is working to develop the technology. “Ammonia is a negative from an air-quality standpoint.”
About 90 percent of manure is water. The system now extracts about 50 gallons of water from each 100 gallons of manure, and Wallace said developers are aiming at raising that to 65 gallons.
Gazette Technical Wizard Pure Water Annie Gives a Quick And Easy Explanation of How Water Softeners Work
The softener shown above has a traditional “timer” control. Most modern residential softeners now use more sophisticated electronic controls. but the softening process described below is still the same.
A water softener is an ion exchanger. Hard water—water with a high calcium/magnesium content—enters the softener through the “In” port indicated by the green arrow. It passes through the control valve and into the treatment tank, where it goes from top to bottom through a specially prepared resin that “softens” it.
The resin consists of beads that have been specially manufactured to be saturated with sodium ions. “Softening” occurs as the hardness minerals in the water, mainly calcium and magnesium, attach themselves to the resin and are “exchanged” for sodium. The water is now essentially free of the hardness minerals, but it has a higher sodium content.
The softened water then enters the long center tube, called a riser, via the strainer basket in the bottom of the tank and passes upward through the riser. The water exits the softener via the control valve (blue arrow) and is sent to the home.
When the resin becomes saturated by hardness minerals, the softener automatically goes into regeneration. (The regeneration process is initiated by a timer or a meter, depending on the type of softener you own.) By this process the hardness minerals are washed off of the resin and down the drain (via a drain tube not shown in the diagram), and the resin bed is rinsed, resettled, and recharged with sodium. It is now again ready to soften your water.
The regeneration process is accomplished by passing very salty water from the brine tank through the resin to renew its ability to soften water.
The brine tank must contain softener salt at all times so that it can regenerate the softening resin again and again.
Regeneration in standard softeners involves several distinct steps:
The backwash, where water is run upward through the resin bed to clean it and resettle it.
The brine draw or brine rinse, where the very salty brine is slowly drawn from the brine tank and sent through the resin bed.
The rapid rinse, where the softener runs clean water downward through the resin bed to resettle the bed and remove excessive salt.
The brine refill, where the softener puts clean water into the brine tank to make brine for the next regeneration.
Glossary
Brine. Name given the extremely salty water that is used to regenerate the softener’s resin.
Grain. A standard measure of hardness. A “grain” of hardness is the equivalent of 17.1 parts per million.
Hardness. The concentration of calcium and magnesium salts in the water.
Hard Water. Though not all authorities agree on a precise definition, water with over 7 grains of hardness is considered “hard” by almost everyone. Many would say that hardness begins at a lower number.
Ion Exchange. A chemical reaction in which ions are exchanged in solution. In the case of the water softener, which is a cation exchanger, calcium and magnesium are exchanged for sodium. Many other ion exchange devices exist for different water treatment tasks.
Regeneration. The process by which an ion exchanger (like a water softener) renews its ability to do its job. In the case of the softener, a strong brine solution is passed through the resin bed and sodium is exchanged for calcium and magnesium.
Resin. Specially manufactured polymer beads used in the ion exchange process to remove dissolved salts from water.
My No-Soap, No-Shampoo, Bacteria-Rich Hygiene Experiment
by Julia Scott
Introductory Note: The article below offers a glimpse at a new way of thinking about our relationship with the natural world. Julia Scott’s research supports my own beliefs that much of our reliance on personal care chemicals is actually no more than habit–a habit supported and encouraged by advertising and aggressive marketing. Our addiction to personal care chemicals is part of the overall war on bacteria that has characterized our age. We are, fortunately, learning that this is a very bad idea; but our addiction to personal care items aimed at keeping us squeaky clean and bacteria free will be a hard one to break. Scott’s article will show you, though, that a world without shampoos, harsh soaps, and, yes, even without showering may be possible if we are bold enough to question the wisdom of commercials that tell us that we will be social outcasts if our hair doesn’t glisten. — Gene Franks.
The M.I.T.-trained chemical engineer who invented AO+ has not showered for the past 12 years.
For most of my life, if I’ve thought at all about the bacteria living on my skin, it has been while trying to scrub them away. But recently I spent four weeks rubbing them in. I was Subject 26 in testing a living bacterial skin tonic, developed by AOBiome, a biotech start-up in Cambridge, Mass. The tonic looks, feels and tastes like water, but each spray bottle of AO+ Refreshing Cosmetic Mist contains billions of cultivated Nitrosomonas eutropha, an ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) that is most commonly found in dirt and untreated water. AOBiome scientists hypothesize that it once lived happily on us too — before we started washing it away with soap and shampoo — acting as a built-in cleanser, deodorant, anti-inflammatory and immune booster by feeding on the ammonia in our sweat and converting it into nitrite and nitric oxide.
In the conference room of the cramped offices that the four-person AOBiome team rents at a start-up incubator, Spiros Jamas, the chief executive, handed me a chilled bottle of the solution from the refrigerator. “These are AOB,” he said. “They’re very innocuous.” Because the N. eutropha are alive, he said, they would need to be kept cold to remain stable. I would be required to mist my face, scalp and body with bacteria twice a day. I would be swabbed every week at a lab, and the samples would be analyzed to detect changes in my invisible microbial community.
In the last few years, the microbiome (sometimes referred to as “the second genome”) has become a focus for the health conscious and for scientists alike. Studies like the Human Microbiome Project, a national enterprise to sequence bacterial DNA taken from 242 healthy Americans, have tagged 19 of our phyla (groupings of bacteria), each with thousands of distinct species. As Michael Pollan wrote in this magazine last year: “As a civilization, we’ve just spent the better part of a century doing our unwitting best to wreck the human-associated microbiota. . . . Whether any cures emerge from the exploration of the second genome, the implications of what has already been learned — for our sense of self, for our definition of health and for our attitude toward bacteria in general — are difficult to overstate.”
While most microbiome studies have focused on the health implications of what’s found deep in the gut, companies like AOBiome are interested in how we can manipulate the hidden universe of organisms (bacteria, viruses and fungi) teeming throughout our glands, hair follicles and epidermis. They see long-term medical possibilities in the idea of adding skin bacteria instead of vanquishing them with antibacterials — the potential to change how we diagnose and treat serious skin ailments. But drug treatments require the approval of the Food and Drug Administration, an onerous and expensive process that can take upward of a decade. Instead, AOBiome’s founders introduced AO+ under the loosely regulated “cosmetics” umbrella as a way to release their skin tonic quickly. With luck, the sales revenue will help to finance their research into drug applications. “The cosmetic route is the quickest,” Jamas said. “The other route is the hardest, the most expensive and the most rewarding.”
AOBiome does not market its product as an alternative to conventional cleansers, but it notes that some regular users may find themselves less reliant on soaps, moisturizers and deodorants after as little as a month. Jamas, a quiet, serial entrepreneur with a doctorate in biotechnology, incorporated N. eutropha into his hygiene routine years ago; today he uses soap just twice a week. The chairman of the company’s board of directors, Jamie Heywood, lathers up once or twice a month and shampoos just three times a year. The most extreme case is David Whitlock, the M.I.T.-trained chemical engineer who invented AO+. He has not showered for the past 12 years. He occasionally takes a sponge bath to wash away grime but trusts his skin’s bacterial colony to do the rest. I met these men. I got close enough to shake their hands, engage in casual conversation and note that they in no way conveyed a sense of being “unclean” in either the visual or olfactory sense.
For my part in the AO+ study, I wanted to see what the bacteria could do quickly, and I wanted to cut down on variables, so I decided to sacrifice my own soaps, shampoo and deodorant while participating. I was determined to grow a garden of my own.
The story of AOBiome begins in 2001, in a patch of dirt on the floor of a Boston-area horse stable, where Whitlock was collecting soil samples. A few months before, an equestrienne he was dating asked him to answer a question she had long been curious about: Why did her horse like to roll in the dirt? Whitlock didn’t know, but he saw an opportunity to impress.
Whitlock thought about how much horses sweat in the summer. He wondered whether the animals managed their sweat by engaging in dirt bathing. Could there be a kind of “good” bacteria in the dirt that fed off perspiration? He knew there was a class of bacteria that derive their energy from ammonia rather than from carbon and grew convinced that horses (and possibly other mammals that engage in dirt bathing) would be covered in them. “The only way that horses could evolve this behavior was if they had substantial evolutionary benefits from it,” he told me.
Whitlock gathered his samples and brought them back to his makeshift home laboratory, where he skimmed off the dirt and grew the bacteria in an ammonia solution (to simulate sweat). The strain that emerged as the hardiest was indeed an ammonia oxidizer: N. eutropha. Here was one way to test his “clean dirt” theory: Whitlock put the bacteria in water and dumped them onto his head and body.
Some skin bacteria species double every 20 minutes; ammonia-oxidizing bacteria are much slower, doubling only every 10 hours. They are delicate creatures, so Whitlock decided to avoid showering to simulate a pre-soap living condition. “I wasn’t sure what would happen,” he said, “but I knew it would be good.”
The bacteria thrived on Whitlock. AO+ was created using bacterial cultures from his skin.
And now the bacteria were on my skin.
I had warned my friends and co-workers about my experiment, and while there were plenty of jokes — someone left a stick of deodorant on my desk; people started referring to me as “Teen Spirit” — when I pressed them to sniff me after a few soap-free days, no one could detect a difference. Aside from my increasingly greasy hair, the real changes were invisible. By the end of the week, Jamas was happy to see test results that showed the N. eutropha had begun to settle in, finding a friendly niche within my biome.
AOBiome is not the first company to try to leverage emerging discoveries about the skin microbiome into topical products. The skin-care aisle at my drugstore had a moisturizer with a “probiotic complex,” which contains an extract of Lactobacillus, species unknown. Online, companies offer face masks, creams and cleansers, capitalizing on the booming market in probiotic yogurts and nutritional supplements. There is even a “frozen yogurt” body cleanser whose second ingredient is sodium lauryl sulfate, a potent detergent, so you can remove your healthy bacteria just as fast as you can grow them.
Audrey Gueniche, a project director in L’Oréal’s research and innovation division, said the recent skin microbiome craze “has revolutionized the way we study the skin and the results we look for.” L’Oréal has patented several bacterial treatments for dry and sensitive skin, including Bifidobacterium longum extract, which it uses in a Lancôme product. Clinique sells a foundation with Lactobacillus ferment, and its parent company, Estée Lauder, holds a patent for skin application of Lactobacillus plantarum. But it’s unclear whether the probiotics in any of these products would actually have any effect on skin: Although a few studies have shown that Lactobacillus may reduce symptoms of eczema when taken orally, it does not live on the skin with any abundance, making it “a curious place to start for a skin probiotic,” said Michael Fischbach, a microbiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. Extracts are not alive, so they won’t be colonizing anything.
To differentiate their product from others on the market, the makers of AO+ use the term “probiotics” sparingly, preferring instead to refer to “microbiomics.” No matter what their marketing approach, at this stage the company is still in the process of defining itself. It doesn’t help that the F.D.A. has no regulatory definition for “probiotic” and has never approved such a product for therapeutic use. “The skin microbiome is the wild frontier,” Fischbach told me. “We know very little about what goes wrong when things go wrong and whether fixing the bacterial community is going to fix any real problems.”
I didn’t really grasp how much was yet unknown until I received my skin swab results from Week 2. My overall bacterial landscape was consistent with the majority of Americans’: Most of my bacteria fell into the genera Propionibacterium, Corynebacterium and Staphylococcus, which are among the most common groups. (S. epidermidis is one of several Staphylococcus species that reside on the skin without harming it.) But my test results also showed hundreds of unknown bacterial strains that simply haven’t been classified yet.
Meanwhile, I began to regret my decision to use AO+ as a replacement for soap and shampoo. People began asking if I’d “done something new” with my hair, which turned a full shade darker for being coated in oil that my scalp wouldn’t stop producing. I slept with a towel over my pillow and found myself avoiding parties and public events. Mortified by my body odor, I kept my arms pinned to my sides, unless someone volunteered to smell my armpit. One friend detected the smell of onions. Another caught a whiff of “pleasant pot.”
When I visited the gym, I followed AOBiome’s instructions, misting myself before leaving the house and again when I came home. The results: After letting the spray dry on my skin, I smelled better. Not odorless, but not as bad as I would have ordinarily. And, oddly, my feet didn’t smell at all.
My skin began to change for the better. It actually became softer and smoother, rather than dry and flaky, as though a sauna’s worth of humidity had penetrated my winter-hardened shell. And my complexion, prone to hormone-related breakouts, was clear. For the first time ever, my pores seemed to shrink. As I took my morning “shower” — a three-minute rinse in a bathroom devoid of hygiene products — I remembered all the antibiotics I took as a teenager to quell my acne. How funny it would be if adding bacteria were the answer all along.
Dr. Elizabeth Grice, an assistant professor of dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the role of microbiota in wound healing and inflammatory skin disease, said she believed that discoveries about the second genome might one day not only revolutionize treatments for acne but also — as AOBiome and its biotech peers hope — help us diagnose and cure disease, heal severe lesions and more. Those with wounds that fail to respond to antibiotics could receive a probiotic cocktail adapted to fight the specific strain of infecting bacteria. Body odor could be altered to repel insects and thereby fight malaria and dengue fever. And eczema and other chronic inflammatory disorders could be ameliorated.
According to Julie Segre, a senior investigator at the National Human Genome Research Institute and a specialist on the skin microbiome, there is a strong correlation between eczema flare-ups and the colonization of Staphylococcus aureus on the skin. Segre told me that scientists don’t know what triggers the bacterial bloom. But if an eczema patient could monitor their microbes in real time, they could lessen flare-ups. “Just like someone who has diabetes is checking their blood-sugar levels, a kid who had eczema would be checking their microbial-diversity levels by swabbing their skin,” Segre said.
AOBiome says its early research seems to hold promise. In-house lab results show that AOB activates enough acidified nitrite to diminish the dangerous methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). A regime of concentrated AO+ caused a hundredfold decrease of Propionibacterium acnes, often blamed for acne breakouts. And the company says that diabetic mice with skin wounds heal more quickly after two weeks of treatment with a formulation of AOB.
Soon, AOBiome will file an Investigational New Drug Application with the F.D.A. to request permission to test more concentrated forms of AOB for the treatment of diabetic ulcers and other dermatologic conditions. “It’s very, very easy to make a quack therapy; to put together a bunch of biological links to convince someone that something’s true,” Heywood said. “What would hurt us is trying to sell anything ahead of the data.”
As my experiment drew to a close, I found myself reluctant to return to my old routine of daily shampooing and face treatments. A month earlier, I packed all my hygiene products into a cooler and hid it away. On the last day of the experiment, I opened it up, wrinkling my nose at the chemical odor. Almost everything in the cooler was a synthesized liquid surfactant, with lab-manufactured ingredients engineered to smell good and add moisture to replace the oils they washed away. I asked AOBiome which of my products was the biggest threat to the “good” bacteria on my skin. The answer was equivocal: Sodium lauryl sulfate, the first ingredient in many shampoos, may be the deadliest to N. eutropha, but nearly all common liquid cleansers remove at least some of the bacteria. Antibacterial soaps are most likely the worst culprits, but even soaps made with only vegetable oils or animal fats strip the skin of AOB.
Bar soaps don’t need bacteria-killing preservatives the way liquid soaps do, but they are more concentrated and more alkaline, whereas liquid soaps are often milder and closer to the natural pH of skin. Which is better for our bacteria? “The short answer is, we don’t know,” said Dr. Larry Weiss, founder of CleanWell, a botanical-cleanser manufacturer. Weiss is helping AOBiome put together a list of “bacteria-safe” cleansers based on lab testing. In the end, I tipped most of my products into the trash and purchased a basic soap and a fragrance-free shampoo with a short list of easily pronounceable ingredients. Then I enjoyed a very long shower, hoping my robust biofilm would hang on tight.
One week after the end of the experiment, though, a final skin swab found almost no evidence of N. eutropha anywhere on my skin. It had taken me a month to coax a new colony of bacteria onto my body. It took me three showers to extirpate it. Billions of bacteria, and they had disappeared as invisibly as they arrived. I had come to think of them as “mine,” and yet I had evicted them.
