"Toxic Waters" Article From The New York Times

An excellent article on water quality in the United States entitled "Toxic Waters" , was published by the NY Times on December 16, 2009. The premise of the article is that just because a water is "legal" it may not be "healthy". Our policy is not to be a fear monger, but the article was very concerning.

A very interesting part of this article was the water quality data for each State. The amount of data is mind boggling! The data was collected and analysed by the Environmental Working Group who shared it with The New York Times.

Water Analysis Article

I came across an excellent article in an old issue of Water Conditioning & Purification magazine entitled "Making Sense of an Incomplete Water Analysis" by Frank DeSilva of ResinTech Inc. This article defines what the minimum required water analyses are for:

Cationic Applications (hardness removal, metals removal, radium removal)

Anionic Applications (sulfate removal, nitrate removal, chromate removal, uranium removal, organics removal, perchlorate removal, fluoride removal, dealkalizers, boron removal)

Deionizer Applications

Prior to quoting a residential, industrial, commercial, or municipal water treatment system, the first question we ask at Res-Kem is an inlet water analysis. Often we need to work with incomplete or missing information. The main thrust of the article explains how an educated water treatment person can deduce a missing cation/anion value when there are other known water test values available. As a result, you will be able to properly size the water treatment system.

One great piece of information was the following chart. This chart makes it extremely easy to calculate the cation-anion balance and how to size the system. The conversion factor takes the concentration of an ion in mg/liter to ppm as CaCO3