What I found at work

So Friday afternoon I finished up work early but didnt feel like calling it a day so I Stuck around and decided to clean up the shop a bit and try to create some more space. So while digging throu a corner full of junk, I first come across a box of filters and then next I come across a whole filtering setup (which obviously gave me some ideas) but then as I continued to move things around, this was under neath it all



Incase anyone doesnt know what it is... its a complete reverse osmosis/deionising unit but is setup in a fashion where the tanks continue to recycle the water over and over so you dont end up with any wasted water.





Now for the interesting part... When I filled up the main tank with the city water it was approx 580ppm which was insane. Well after running the machine for approx 5 mins, the ppm was down to 75ppm. So I let it run for the remainder of the afternoon until I got 5 Gallons of Water @ 0ppm.

Now I just gotta get it home and setup in the garage

WOW what a cool steup......thats seriously cool find!

Whoa. Sweet. Is it loud?

you just saved yourself about $500, and you'll certianly see the difference in the plant's health if you start with oppm water. The best H2O you can get for the optimum control of the feeding program. SWEET

wow sweet find....how much would one of those units cost new??

thats insane looking. looks like it would use some serious electricity though.

The Garden Shed said:

you just saved yourself about $500, and you'll certianly see the difference in the plant's health if you start with oppm water. The best H2O you can get for the optimum control of the feeding program. SWEET

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Probably more... but I plan to tinker with the unit a bit over the holidays to see if I can get it working better but I plan on keeping enough water for both Drinking & Feeding the Plants.

FourTwentyMan said:

wow sweet find....how much would one of those units cost new??

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Couple grand as far as I'm aware... but I'm not using it the way it was intended to be used (via the filters on the sides etc) I used the unit more so for the pumps and holding tanks, then used the Mini Filter setup rigged above to filter the water from one tank to the other, and that setup is only worth a couple hundred bucks.

MagusALL said:

thats insane looking. looks like it would use some serious electricity though.

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Not really... its got two little electric pumps, 1 to circulate the water throughout the system etc and the other to pump the water out of the holding tank and into a jug or what not. Pumps are wired up to 120V currently and you can filter 5 Gallons of clean water in approx 3hrs ? and in that 3hrs of running I cant see it using that much hydro

uh where do you work???

Betterthanjesus said:

uh where do you work???

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We do equipment sales & repairs for pretty much anything and everything so my boss buys all sorts of whacky stuff from auction sales with the intent of re-sale in mind.

I even remember when he got all this water filtering stuff a few years ago but I never put any thought into it until this year when I started growing indoors and ran into issues with the water ppm so decided something had to be done and remembered about all the crap my boss had at work.

That's really fucking cool man, good work! 0ppm is going to make for some great plant food. You can pump your plants full of nutes and not have to factor in the base ppm's of tap water.

Sublime757 said:

That's really fucking cool man, good work! 0ppm is going to make for some great plant food. You can pump your plants full of nutes and not have to factor in the base ppm's of tap water.

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Honestly, my general rule is... if I wont drink the water, then I wont feed it to my plants and I refuse to drink tap water "if given a choice". Well we normally buy Bottled Water to drink and that is what I was feeding my plants inside with... well even that water is 290ppm which had way to much calcuim in it so it was locking out the magnesium in the soil making the plants suffer from a mg deficiency.

Tap water here is between 550-600ppm which is insane.

wanna sell it?

hmmm..while we are on the subject....what does ppm have to do with anything ..im not the experienced and was jsut wondering if you could enlighten me i have no knowledge of this subject...any information would be helpful...and does it really matter that much ?thx guys

dont steal if u did steal it

FourTwentyMan said:

hmmm..while we are on the subject....what does ppm have to do with anything ..im not the experienced and was jsut wondering if you could enlighten me i have no knowledge of this subject...any information would be helpful...and does it really matter that much ?thx guys

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PPM stands for Parts Per Million...

Higher the PPM, the more crap in the water such as Hydrogencarbonate, Calcium, Chlorine, Magnesium, Potassium, Sodium, Sulfur, Zinc, etc etc

One example is if you have to much calcium built up in soil, it will lock out magnesium and I think water over 200ppm tends to have to much calcium in it.

With a Reverse Osmosis Unit, you can select whatever type of Filters you want in order to Filter whatever you want out of the water.

Well after a bit more work I got the unit all setup proper and almost 100% complete now. I was pretty damn shocked with all the stuff that I kept coming across as their were all types of goodies



Now this Control Unit was bolted to the side of something else "no clue what" but I noticed it was a PH Meter/Control so I pulled it off and got it all hooked up onto the OS Unit. Only downside is I have yet to locate the actually probe for the meter but have a handheld unit for the time being.



Then while digging throu another pile of junk I came across a few pumps so I decided to hook up one of those to the OS Unit to oxygenate the water some what.



All in all, I'm loving this thing. Boss wont let me have it obviously but having access to it is just as good as I now have all the 0ppm water I'll never need.

fuckin' sweet man, once you find that probe, it'll shave ample time. That thing must go through 1000's of gallons/day. You could actually start a water company, all you need is bottles, a truck and a guy to bottle and deliver. Wine and beer brewers love 0ppm water.

The Garden Shed said:

fuckin' sweet man, once you find that probe, it'll shave ample time. That thing must go through 1000's of gallons/day. You could actually start a water company, all you need is bottles, a truck and a guy to bottle and deliver. Wine and beer brewers love 0ppm water.

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Well right now I'm actually the only person using it and I only filter 5 gallons of water @ a time and I figure that'll last atleast 3 weeks.

And I had mentioned selling water but the first thing that came back was, you'd have to be licensed to do so, couldnt just open up your own water company and go nuts. But in the mean time, its saving me alot of money since I no longer have to buy bottled water.

you need to set up a flow through with a drain for the waste water, and watch that puppy go. I can sell you a filter the size of a video camera that'll go through 100G/day, that's roughly 100x bigger filter colums, how long does it take to make the 5 G?

The Garden Shed said:

you need to set up a flow through with a drain for the waste water, and watch that puppy go. I can sell you a filter the size of a video camera that'll go through 100G/day, that's roughly 100x bigger filter colums, how long does it take to make the 5 G?

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Well im not an expert with this stuff but according to the boss, their is no waste water. My understanding is, as the filtering system filters the water it will dump the clean water into holding tank (a) and the dirty or "waste water" back into holding tank (b) where it came from and will continue to do so until its no longer dirty.

As for how long it took to do the 5 gallons, I never timed it and have yet to run outta water from the 1st time so have yet to try again. And previously, I never had any of the metering equipment hooked up so Im not even sure how much water either holding tank actually holds. I let it run for approx 1-1.5hr and would guess it went throu approx 10-15 gallons as I took 5, the boos took 5 and the holding tank still had water left in it.

I just checked how much water I had left thou and Im done to almost none so Im gonna fire up the unit tomorrow when I go in and actually measure the amount of water being used and time the process and then I'll let you know the exact numbers.