09|17|2015

Save time, save money

You know that sinking feeling. Filter runs are getting shorter and shorter. Backwashing seems uneven, and doesn’t seem to be getting the filters clean. Even immediately after backwashing, headloss remains high and the filter capacity is not what it needs to be. Your productivity is suffering. Your turbidity numbers are higher than you like to see them. The water quality is still acceptable, but not where YOU want it. It’s not what your customers have come to expect.

Grudgingly you look at the calendar and demand records for the last year, hoping to find the next low demand period so you can take the filters out of service and replace the media. You also know it needs to be an extended period as this is affecting ALL your filters, not just one or two. The disruption, as you vacuum out the filter media, try to clean the filter walls, troughs, and underdrains, and then truck in the replacement media, will take well over a week. Then you start making calls to the media suppliers to determine the replacement costs. You contact the landfill to determine the disposal fees. With water demand up, you just don’t know when you will find the right time. You just hope that this whole process doesn’t damage your underdrains.

It’s not the media, it’s the deposits

Usually, there is nothing wrong with your media. However, over time, organic and inorganic deposits – biofilms, calcium scale, iron, manganese, algae – coat the media and can’t be removed during the backwash. These deposits alter the media characteristics:

  • Increase the size of the media particles, filling voids, degrading the capacity and altering filtration properties, reducing effectiveness.
  • Reduce the uniformity of the media particles, altering the fluid flow patterns and contributing to channeling and short-circuiting.
  • Rounds the angularity of the particles, impacting their ability to create the turbulent flow needed for optimum filter performance. This rounding is the most frequently cited reason for media replacement.

Remove these deposits to restore your filter media to its design conditions

Blue Earth Products designed its suite of filter cleaning products specifically to dissolve these deposits, so that they can be rinsed away.

Due to the wide variety of filter media, deposits, and filter construction, media cleaning chemistry also varies. Blue Earth Products understands this chemistry and developed the complete line of patent pending formulas to address these varying requirements.

The chemists and engineers at Blue Earth Products can analyze your filter media, determining the type of deposits and the extent of deposition. They will evaluate your backwash system, and consider the construction of your filter and underdrain system. They will then run bench tests to determine the right product and the right dosage to restore your media.

Blue Earth Products proprietary formulas are suitable for pressure or gravity filters, and on almost all media types including anthracite, sand, green sand, ceramic, GAC and other specialty media.

Restoring capacity, restoring performance, custom tailored to your filter, your media, your deposits.

Clean in place, even the underdrains

Deposits don’t just affect the media, they also coat and clog the underdrains, increasing pressure drop across the drains and impacting filter performance. Replacing the media does not address the underdrains, which require separate cleaning, adding to the time and expense of media replacement. With the complex designs of many underdrains, this method of cleaning is often less than totally effective.

Blue Earth Products filter cleaning products clean in place, penetrating all the media layers down to and through the underdrain caps, into the underdrains. Our products thoroughly remove deposits that reduce production rates, restoring the flow capacity. Backwash distribution begins in the underdrains, so the Blue Earth Products media cleaning process also restores the backwash effectiveness and efficiency from the underdrains up.

Save money, save energy, save water, but more important, save time

In most cases, the cost to clean the filter media is a fraction of the cost to replace – from 30% to 50% less than replacement.

Even more critical are the time savings. Filter cleaning can be done in as little as 24 hours. Compare that to the 5 to 10 days required for media replacement. Filter cleaning gets your filters back in production quicker, producing the quality water that your customers expect.

Filter restoration with Blue Earth Products products is quick and economical, so you can restore your filters sooner in the process, before they approach failure. You save on backwash energy, and improve filter run time and water productivity, saving you even more money.

Safe, sustainable, cost effective, efficient

With just a couple of liters of filter media, and information about your system, the chemists at Blue Earth Lab can custom design just the right filter media cleaning program for your system.

Restoring your filter to design conditions quickly, cost effectively, with less disruption. Doesn’t that sound like a better alternative?

DOWNLOAD TWO-STEP CLEANING