reverse osmosis filtration systems

[JohnRoberts]

In a rather unpleasant coincidence I woke up this morning to standing water covering my kitchen floor. I quickly found the leak... one of the water lines feeding into the UV light chamber was piddling out a spray of water.

Those water connection are just press in. I wiggled the tubing and pressed it in harder and it stopped leaking. That connection was made over ten years ago without a drip since.

I may need to cut off the end and reseat it, after I dry out my floor.

JR 

[update- my big dog carpet shampooer makes a serviceable wet vacuum. /update]

 

[JohnRoberts]

My dodgy quick-connect press in fitting failed again... More water on my kitchen floor. This time the good news was that it happened midday while I was awake, so I caught it before it released too much water.

The press-in connection that failed was one of the two 1/4" lines feeding my UV lamp unit. As often happens in life I found out from my post mortem after I replaced the entire UV unit that the actual failure was a cheap plastic collet, at least it should be cheap. After figuring this out I looked for somebody selling replacement collets and found one vendor selling them for $1 each + S&H.... I figure these should cost a manufacturer pennies each.

In the photograph from left to right is a perfect new collet/clip that I borrowed from a new unused press-in fitting. The middle collet is the one from my UV unit that hadn't failed completely yet. You can see that it only has two of the four original tangs (?) or fingers left on it still. The far right collet has zero fingers left and was completely worthless at holding the water line in place.

In hindsight I think I have figured out a couple of contributory failure factors. These water lines were used on a UV lamp housing. UV light can degrade/break polymer chains in typical plastics from exposure over time. I actually found one series of UV resistant press-in fittings made for outdoor use, but these were only available in 3/4" or 1" hose sizes.

A second factor is fatigue from repetitive wiggling or shaking caused by pipe hammer in the output line from the permeate pump. The pump didn't feed the UV unit directly but it wiggled lines it was close to and touching. Its hard to visualize pipe hammer in 1/4" plastic tubing but they would move every time the permeate pump cycles and puts out pressure pulses. This repetitive stress could fatigue regular plastic, and plastic made brittle by UV light would be even easier to break.

Of course I may be overthinking this.

JR

 

[JohnRoberts]

I just bit the bullet and ordered brass compression fittings for just these two connections to completely eliminate any possibility of harm from UV light degrading plastic components. Perhaps over kill. It is impossible to eliminate all of the quick connect press in fittings in my entire RO system, but I could replace these two.

JR

 

[cyrano]

Perhaps it's a good thing to have a RO system for drinking water...

The latest report about drinking water in the US found uranium in two thirds of the municipal water supplies. Mostly in Hispanic communities. It also found other stuff too:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220407101125.htm
In some aspects this is worse than rural Africa.

 

[fazer]

The latest report about drinking water in the US found uranium in two thirds of the municipal water supplies.

In Colorado, there was a plutonium trigger manufacture called Rocky flats. Originally run by Dow chemical and later by Hughes There were at least 3 plutonium fires with release to the air. Also plutonium waste water and oil were kept on the grounds in plastic barrels as well as stacks of contaminated machine tools. The department of defense. And department of energy finally closed down the facility. Some of the highly contaminated rooms were impossible to deal with so they simply buried them and put multi-feet of concrete over the top stating it would take 75 years to come up with technology to deal with it. Then 7 years later they said it was finished and could be turned into a wildlife area. Now the place has huge housing developments around the old plant location. There is hot soils and a lake to the east that you are not allowed to wade in the mud in the water so as not to disturb the contamination in the mud from the earlier plutonium fires and god knows what else. Did I mention the lake water is part of a cities water supply. It would be great to measure the water quality with these heavy metal test.

 

[cyrano]

We used to build homes on landfills too, in the sixties. It was deemed safe, until in one of them most people developed strange ailments. Those houses were torn down. The rest is still up. Mind you, that was household garbage, not industrial. Of course, there were no checks of what was put in the landfill, so anything is possible.

Ah, the USA. Such a beautiful country, but so much heavy pollution.

 

[JohnRoberts]

oh dear.... Living here must suck.

JR