Aquamatic Valve Repair Service

After viewing our extensive video library on identifying, ordering, and repairing AquaMatic diaphragm valves, people have been concerned about the complexity of getting the correct Aquamatic valve and/or parts. Also, some are concerned with needing special tools and the difficulty of repairing these valves. So they asked us if we can repair their valves for them. The answer is YES!

Within our Service Area:
If you are located within our service area, one of our service people can repair the diaphragm valves at your site. If you need an uninterrupted treated water delivery, we will have to work around your production shutdown schedule and will need to bring a spare valve of each size at your facility so we can rapidly replace the valves and get you up and running as quickly as possible.

Outside of Service Area:
If you are outside our service area, we can repair your Aquamatic valves in our shop. To get your facility up and running as quickly as possible, you will definitely need to purchase spare valves for each valve you will send to us to for repair.

Aquamatic Valve Videos-K520, Panel Discussions & K530

Four more Aquamatic videos were added. The topics are:

Which Metal Aquamatic Valve Do I Have?-Part 1 This is a panel discussion with Mike & Bob on how to identify which metal Aquamatic valve you have.

Which Metal Aquamatic Valve Do I Have?-Part 2 This is the continuation of a panel discussion with Mike & Bob on how to identify which metal Aquamatic valve you have.

Aquamatic K530 Plastic Diaphragm Valves Identifying, Valve Cutaway & End Adapter Choices of an Aquamatic K530 by Bob, Res-Kem Corp's Service Manager.

Aquamatic K520 Plastic Diaphragm Valves Identifying, Valve Cutaway & End Adapter Choices of an Aquamatic K520 by Res-Kem Corp's Service Manager

Aquamatic Valve Videos - K530 and V42 Series Valves

At Res-Kem, we developed a series of videos on the Aquamatic K530 Series of plastic diaphragm valves and the Aquamatic V42 Series of cast iron diaphragm valves.

Please stay tuned. We have more videos in the "vault", but need to be edited before we can post them. Please note, these are videos of only two valves, these are nearly a limitless number of possible valve permutations.

Contact us for help!

The subjects of the videos are as follows:

Selecting Aquamatic V42 Series Valves-Using the Ordering Guides:

Repairing the V42 Series Cast Iron AquaMatic Valves Part 1 (Disassembly):

Repairing the V42 Series Cast Iron AquaMatic Valves Part 2 (Reassembly):

Features of the Aquamatic K530 Series Plastic Diaphragm Valves:

Repairing the V530 Series Plastic Diaphragm Valves Part 1 (Disassembly)

Repairing the V530 Series Plastic Diaphragm Valves Part 2A (Reassembly):

Repairing the V530 Series Plastic Diaphragm Valves Part 2B (Final Reassembly):
As you can see, these videos are posted on YouTube.

Activated Carbon, Res-Kem and The Marketplace

Particle Size:
Carbon typically comes in 12 x 40 mesh (size of granule). 12 mesh is a particle size of 1.7 mm or 0.066 inches. 40 mesh is a particle size of 0.425 mm or .0016 inches. 98% of Res-Kem sales are 12 x 40.
Carbon must be acid washed to remove contaminants on the carbon. The contaminants removed are primarily metals like Iron which are soluble in acidic streams,

Types of carbon:
Coconut shell (80% of market place)
Bituminous coal (20% of market place)
The trend has changed to coconut because the manufacturing process is more efficient than coal because it does not contain as many contaminants. Depending upon the quality of the coal and where it is from, coal can naturally contains metals and heavy metals. If these contaminants are not removed at the factory, they can leach out into your water.

Carbon Quality:
The Iodine Number a test used to quantify the adsorption qualities of activated carbon. Generally, the higher the iodine number, the better the removal quality of activated carbon to remove contaminants in water.

Coconut = 1,000 and more Iodine number.
Coal = Anywhere between 800-1100 Iodine number.

Brands:
The three major brands of activated carbon are:
Calgon with their Centaur brand activated carbon
Jacobi
Norit

Res-Kem offers through Calgon a carbon return program. After filling out a carbon acceptance form and approval, Calgon will take back carbon for reactivation or incineration.

Markets:
Activated carbon is used in the industrial, municipal, commercial and residential markets. Carbon is used to remove chlorine, chloramine, taste, odor, and color from water.

Residential Water Treatment Training Program at Res-Kem

It was a very eventful time here at Res-Kem the past few days in training. I learned about various resins and how certain chemicals react together depending upon their positive or negative charge. I also learned how complex carbon is and how different it can vary in quality. I have a better understanding on how water treatment units are sold through independent dealers and through franchises. I learned about the physical attributes of water treatment units. Learning about mechanical and electronical interfaces on valves gave me sufficient insight on the technological advancement in the Residential sector. Understanding how the quality of water in Residential can effect people's lives is very interesting.

One of the most interesting things I observed this week was the processes Res-Kem employees must maintain in order to help move this company forward in the water treatment industry, while serving the general public.

Water Treatment Expert in the Making at Res-Kem

Last week, Bao Huynh started as a new employee at Res-Kem. Besides being new to Res-Kem, he is new to the water treatment industry. We have asked him to document his progress on the road to be another of the numerous water experts at Res-Kem. We were thinking this would be a great way to help others get an education if they are interested in becoming a water treatment expert themselves.

Bao's responsibilities are to maintain contact with existing customers, reestablish contact with past customers, and develop new customers through direct contact via email, phone, and/or newsletter as he sees fit. You will likely hear from him soon if you are a past, present, or future customer!

Short Ion Exchange Resin Life-What's Happening?

Lately I've been hearing our sales people commenting that customers don't think their cation softening resin is lasting as long as it used to. This is a general comment, not something we're surveying. Here is some food for thought:

Has the manufacturing process changed?
Yes. One of the relatively recent changes to the process came with the non-solvent resins. The greatest motivating factor behind the non-solvent resin came from the EPA. Simply put, the resin manufacturers had to stop manufacturing the resin using solvents because they couldn't put the by-products down the drain. So the resin we used to clean up the water had a manufacturing process that potentially contaminated the water. Makes sense!

Are the non-solvent cation resins lasting as long as the solvent based resins?
According to a major manufacturer non-solvent ion exchange resins are manufactured to meet the same standards of the solvent type. That is, both the solvent and non-solvent resins are 8% crosslink and will react similarly under the same set of circumstances. For instance, both resins, in the presence of 2 ppm chlorine, will react and break down.

Should the solvent free ion exchange resins be used in industrial applications?
According to the data sheets for Sybron C-249 NS and Purolite C-100, the answer to this is yes.

So what are some of the reasons we are seeing shortened life/capacity?
Is there chlorine in the feed water?
In the presence of chlorine or any oxidant, cation ion exchange resins will breakdown prematurely. You say - yes, but the chlorine has always been there. I agree. However, as our water infrastructure has aged have the municipalities been forced in some instances to add more chlorine to compensate?

Are there higher levels of iron in the water?
As we know cation resin will remove ferrous iron but regenerating the iron off of the resin is challenging. Over time there is a loss of capacity as a result of the iron being embedded into the cation bead.

Is the cation resin seeing higher temperatures?
Gel cation resin can tolerate high temperatures but the combination of higher temperatures and an oxidant such as chlorine will dramatically lessen the life of the resin.

We've been supplying ion exchange resins for over 25 years now. We have customers who call every three years, most commonly replacement of anion resin in a demineralizer application and other customers we hear from every 5 or even 7 years - softener applications. I can't say as I've seen a trend that points to bad manufacturing practices by manufacturers.

In my opinion, the overwhelmingly majority of the problems result from oxidants such as chlorine and chloramine and my favorite - Operator Error - Oops ... we just backwashed all the resin out!

Pentair Fleck Electronic Timers

Fleck has been moving quickly with upgrades to their electronic timers, which has created confusion over which is the latest one and which valves accept which timers. Is it ET, SE, XT, NT, NXT? By the time you read this there may be a more recent upgrade to the family of Fleck electronic timers.

So, as of today, Friday, July 31st, 2009, here it is.

Electronic timers

• SXT replaced the SE timer
• XTR replaced the ET timer on the 6700 valve only
• XT replaced the ET timer
• 3200NXT replaced the 3200NT timer
• 3214NXT replaced the 3214NT timer

Electronic timers and applicable valves

SXT	XTR	XT	3200NXT	3214NXT
56SXT	6700	2510	2750	2750
2510		2750	2850	2850
2750		2850	2900	2900
2850		2900	3150	3150
9000		3150	3900	3900
9100		3900
9500		9000
Twinflo100e		9100
ProflowSe		9500

Industrial Water Softener Maintenance

Res-Kem Corp. and our sister company General Water Services offer preventative maintenance contracts for customers here in the Mid-Atlantic region. I thought it might be helpful to go over our Preventative Maintenance procedures for a commercial or industrial water softener for those of you who maintain your own water softening equipment.

For an industrial water softener we suggest our customers have bi-annual visits by our technicians. It's a very simple inspection that can prevent unscheduled downtime and the associated problems. How often our customer tests the water hardness is largely determined by how critical the application is and the availability of staff. We strongly suggest testing the water hardness on a daily basis if possible.

Res-Kem service technicians do a mechanical inspection that includes the following:
Inlet and Outlet Water Hardness - When we specify a commercial or industrial water softener we are given a water analysis, the average, high and low flow rates, hours of operation, and desired end-point. It's important to note changes against the design specification. If all things are equal, seeing hard water at the outlet points to a mechanical problem with the water softener (or no salt in the brine tank). If something else has changed - flow rate is lower or higher than specified or the inlet water hardness has increased - our technician will review the data with our engineering department and discuss the problem in greater depth with the customer.

Inlet and Outlet Pressures - Pressure testing is done when the water softener is running at the design specification. If there is a high differential the water softener might be running at too high a rate. If the water softener is running at a typical flow rate, (10 – 15 gpm/ft2) and there is a high differential pressure, the resin bed could be plugging up and preventing the water from flowing through the softener correctly. The differential pressure across a softener resin bed should generally run less than 15 psig. Of course there are many factors, which can result in higher differential pressures, i.e. depth of the resin bed, design of the internal distribution, age of resin, etc.

Inlet Chlorine (in absence of carbon filter or bi-sulfite feed) - Chlorine will break down cation ion exchange resin. Exposure to significant amounts of free chlorine, "hypochlorite" ions, or other strong oxidizing agents over long periods of time will eventually break down the crosslinking. Over time the cation resin turns to mush and will plug up the bed or eventually be flushed out so there remains much less resin than required.

Check salt level in brine tank, add if necessary

Make Note of Leaks - Our technicians are trained to look carefully for that small drip. We'll fix it if possible while we're there, otherwise we will make an appointment to come back to service the problem. You should have gaskets in on hand for both the manway and handhole openings.

Make Adjustments to the Control Valve - You should have received an operating manual with the water softener which includes information about the system settings.

If outlet water is out of hardness specification adjustments may be necessary.

Verify water softener timer is set to correct time and day.

Recalculate how often the water softener should be regenerating based on hardness and gallons and adjust control as necessary.

Optional Annual Maintenance

Valve Maintenance - There are many different types of controls and valves used on a commercial industrial water softener. In general you will need the following parts on hand to perform this service:

Aquamatic Valve Nest Systems - Diaphragm & Seal Kits, Internal Parts Kits, Seat Tools and Shaft Tools.

Fleck Top Mounted Control Systems - Upper and Lower Seal & Spacer Kits, Top Piston Kit, Lower Piston Kit.

Autotrol Top Mounted Control Systems - Internal parts kits. Specific kits depend on valve type.

Ion Exchange Resin Test - Although softener resin will last significantly longer than deionizer resin, in the presence of chlorine or other oxidants it will break down. If your water is highly chlorinated or has other contaminants such as iron, you should test the resin within 18 to 24 months of start up and every year thereafter. Otherwise, test the resin after the third year and then every year thereafter. By doing so you will know when to budget softener resin replacement as it is often a major expense.

Resin Traps-Insurance for Industrial Water Systems

Recently, Res-Kem published a white paper entitled "Inexpensive Insurance for Water Treatment Systems-Resin Traps" by Ron Madden. In this white paper, three examples demonstrate how resin traps act as inexpensive insurance for costly problems that can develop when ion exchange resin reaches downstream process areas, process equipment, or the product. Depending upon the plant or process, the payback can be nearly instantaneous!


Summary:
A simple resin trap, long favored by experienced operators of water treatment
equipment, is an inexpensive form of insurance being used more frequently in water treatment systems. Should an internal lateral break or otherwise fail, resin traps eliminate the possibility of ion exchange resin or other filtration media leaving water treatment equipment where it belongs, and prevent it from traveling downstream where it does not belong. Install a resin trap. Like insurance, do not wait until catastrophe strikes to see the value.

Examples:
The three examples are from:

An automotive plant where the resin trap was installed AFTER a plant shutdown

A poultry plant where the resin trap was installed AFTER a plant shutdown and quarantine of millions of pounds of processed chicken

A refinery installed BEFORE a problem occur ed