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How Long Do You Flush Your RO Membrane? (1 Viewer)

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Erin

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Ro booster should be before all membranes.

Im doing 100 psi on my ro membrane. Gonna go nuts and install a controller on my ro system. Tds monitor to shut off ro unit is it reads 1 tds Email/text me. Also water leak detectors scattered around for safety.
I thought 100psi would be too high. Maybe it depends on the membrane size? (Or maybe I'm remembering something from a BRS video, lol)
 

soymilk

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100 is on the top end. I think they recommend 90 or so. Make sure you got those lil lock in clips or else you're gonna have a bad time lol.

I only run the rodi when i'm home, and when its powered off the pressure falls back down to 55ish
 

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I have an RO booster pump.. I run 90 psi... I can go higher. ....just timed my flush... took 2 minutes too take my dual membranes from 14 to 4 ppm. Saving my DI resins and it was only 1qt of water.
 

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I thought 100psi would be too high. Maybe it depends on the membrane size? (Or maybe I'm remembering something from a BRS video, lol)
The higher you boost the pressure the more efficient the RO membrane will be. Just be careful going too because you can blow the tubes off the fittings. If it is in your garage where a catastrophic leak doesn't matter so much then 100 PSI is probably fine. If your RO is under your sink like I have you should run a little bit further from the sun. I run at 80 PSI.
 

jrounding

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I have a pressurized storage tank and my setup is an on demand system so I am not setup to deal with TDS creep. I am probably burning through resin because of this, but since I don't produce much water I don't worry about it too much. I recently added two more cartridges. This allowed me to reconfigure my old system to add a second carbon block so now I have two in series. I also run my RO membranes in series for a 200 GPD system. I am running an Anion and mixed bed resin from BRS's pro resin system. So the color change on cartridge 1 changes as the anion is depleted and the color change in resin cartridge 2 changes as the cation is depleted. Since anion is supposed to deplete 5X faster than cation this should make the extra resin I am wasting by not flushing negligible.
 

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The higher you boost the pressure the more efficient the RO membrane will be. Just be careful going too because you can blow the tubes off the fittings. If it is in your garage where a catastrophic leak doesn't matter so much then 100 PSI is probably fine. If your RO is under your sink like I have you should run a little bit further from the sun. I run at 80 PSI.
Dude, it's 2022. Get out of here with your rational advice, grandpa!

This is very good advice and y'all should definitely listen to it!
 
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Ro booster should be before all membranes.

Im doing 100 psi on my ro membrane. Gonna go nuts and install a controller on my ro system. Tds monitor to shut off ro unit is it reads 1 tds Email/text me. Also water leak detectors scattered around for safety.
Really? You pull your DI resin at 1ppm? I've let mine run up to 3-4ppm for a decade or so and never had a problem. Nothing seems to notice it. I think 3ppm is my change-DI-resin threshold, now that I think about it.
 

jrounding

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I’ve been having algae issues. I checked my resin and it was still blue looking. I checked my TDS and was getting 9 ppm out of my RO and 9 ppm out of my resin. Oops….clearly it was doing nothing. So I guess the lesson is don’t rely on the color change resin. Have an inline TDS meter and check it every time you use your RO filter. If it’s high then fix that otherwise you could be topping off with who knows what chemicals that feed the GHA in your tank. Then you have a mess that will take forever to fix.
 
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I’ve been having algae issues. I checked my resin and it was still blue looking. I checked my TDS and was getting 9 ppm out of my RO and 9 ppm out of my resin. Oops….clearly it was doing nothing. So I guess the lesson is don’t rely on the color change resin. Have an inline TDS meter and check it every time you use your RO filter. If it’s high then fix that otherwise you could be topping off with who knows what chemicals that feed the GHA in your tank. Then you have a mess that will take forever to fix.
Absolutely never buy the color changing stuff. You’re paying a premium for an inaccurate detection of the resin’s exhaustion. Get the none-changing one and an in-line tds meter.
 

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Really? You pull your DI resin at 1ppm? I've let mine run up to 3-4ppm for a decade or so and never had a problem. Nothing seems to notice it. I think 3ppm is my change-DI-resin threshold, now that I think about it.
I pull it at 1 ppm. But ymmv

When your resin is new it'll attract whatever ions to it in exchange for a hydrogen ion. When your DI gets "full" it could release things that it has a lesser affinity for in exchange for something it has a stronger affinity for.

Ammonia generally has a weaker ionic bond to the DI. So if your source water has a lot of ammonia/chloramines then towards the end of the DI life, it could be releasing the ammonia ion that it trapped initially for calcium or magnesium or whatever that it likes more. In most cases its probably fine. For my use case, since it seems like I'm always perpetually QTing fish. I rather not risk doing waterchanges for QT with a possible 1-2 ppm ammonia. Since my water report shows them using chloramines, I know after my carbon blocks imma have ammonia.
 

soymilk

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I’ve been having algae issues. I checked my resin and it was still blue looking. I checked my TDS and was getting 9 ppm out of my RO and 9 ppm out of my resin. Oops….clearly it was doing nothing. So I guess the lesson is don’t rely on the color change resin. Have an inline TDS meter and check it every time you use your RO filter. If it’s high then fix that otherwise you could be topping off with who knows what chemicals that feed the GHA in your tank. Then you have a mess that will take forever to fix.
so the color change didn't happen on the anion or the mixed bed? that seems weird.
 
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I pull it at 1 ppm. But ymmv

When your resin is new it'll attract whatever ions to it in exchange for a hydrogen ion. When your DI gets "full" it could release things that it has a lesser affinity for in exchange for something it has a stronger affinity for.

Ammonia generally has a weaker ionic bond to the DI. So if your source water has a lot of ammonia/chloramines then towards the end of the DI life, it could be releasing the ammonia ion that it trapped initially for calcium or magnesium or whatever that it likes more. In most cases its probably fine. For my use case, since it seems like I'm always perpetually QTing fish. I rather not risk doing waterchanges for QT with a possible 1-2 ppm ammonia. Since my water report shows them using chloramines, I know after my carbon blocks imma have ammonia.
You lost me at “ymmv”

00965230-189F-4EA8-9F09-9DA006DC8C27.gif
 

jrounding

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so the color change didn't happen on the anion or the mixed bed? that seems weird.
Yep, I looked at it and it was still blue. Was getting 9 TDS out of my TDS meter. I don’t know what happened, but it caused a mess in my tank. I do understand why people sell these saltwater tanks and leave this hobby at an alarming rate. It can be a severe pain in the ********* and one small mistake can have dire consequences.
 

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Really? You pull your DI resin at 1ppm? I've let mine run up to 3-4ppm for a decade or so and never had a problem. Nothing seems to notice it. I think 3ppm is my change-DI-resin threshold, now that I think about it.

Me too usually around 2-4ppm. Time to change it …filled up the 300/g so ro/di ran for a few days.
 

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BigRick

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yall bois prob wait til your brakes start grinding before changing them pads out eh?

Might as well since you can't turn rotors at O'Reillys for 15 bucks anymore.... just buy a cheap $250 complete rotor/pad kit :peace:
 
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