Water Treatment Maintenance: What is the Cost of Failure?

In the world of industrial water treatment, water conditioning or “pretreatment” refers to the process of removing impurities before the water reaches other systems in your building. That’s why it’s called pretreatment. Common pretreatment processes include water softening, reverse osmosis and deionization.

There are two common reasons why facilities need to pretreat their water:

1. if water quality is poor and impurities need to be removed to prevent damage to systems downstream
2. if the facility needs high-purity water for a specific application like a laboratory or a critical manufacturing process.

In either case, when the efficiency of a pretreatment system drops off – usually due to a lapse in maintenance – there is a running cost that can easily fly below the radar…until a failure occurs. In reality, the result of improper maintenance is immediate, compound, and continuous. Let’s break that down.

Immediate Results

Professional water treaters talk about the importance of “preventative maintenance” for your pretreatment systems. The name is a bit misleading – prevention is only half the game. It could just as well be called performance maintenance. Regular, proper care not only minimizes future repair costs, it maximizes performance right now, so you can capture water and energy efficiencies that show up as savings on your utility bill every month.

If changing the oil on your car improved your car’s fuel economy (some manufacturers claim it does), you would be extra motivated to change your oil on a regular basis. That is the actual case with pretreatment systems. Regular maintenance restores and protects efficiency while preventing big problems down the road.

Think of it this way: If your RO system was designed to remove 98-99% percent of water impurities, you can bet the manufacturer or distributor charged you for that high level of functionality. If inconsistent maintenance has caused performance to slip to say 93%, you are not getting the solution you paid for, and no one is reimbursing you for the difference. In fact, you’re paying extra for it in the form of higher utility bills month over month and costly repairs down the road.

Preventative maintenance is not just an insurance policy for things that could possibly go wrong down the road. It impacts how your investment is earning its keep right now. If there was reason to have purchased the system in the first place, there is a reason to keep it performing at its best today. A little due diligence will ensure you get the results you paid for, which has an immediate and multiplying impact downstream in your facility.

Compound Effects

Pretreatment is an upstream solution and a first defense against damaging impurities. If that defense system experiences a drop in performance, the results are passed along and compounded downstream.

Let’s consider a few of those potential downstream systems. A conventional chemical water treatment system is calibrated for a specific water profile. If that profile shifts due to a downward performance trend at the pretreatment stage, the conventional system will be less efficient as it will use more chemical. And you can’t expect the chemical treatment to compensate for the gap in pretreated water quality. While the two systems work in conjunction with each other, they are designed to do two different things. So the cycle of paying more for diminishing returns is repeated and passed along to the next system.

That next system might be a steam boiler. If a softener or RO system is no longer removing the target level of solids and total hardness from your water, scale deposits will form on boiler coils and other heat transfer surfaces at an accelerated rate. As you might guess from the previous pattern, this makes your boiler less efficient because it must use more energy, resulting in increased utility bills and stressing components. The result is compounded and the cost is multiplied across all systems.

Continuous Bleed

Some costs associated with water systems are a one-time hit – a major equipment repair or a boiler coil cleaning for instance. Even if the ticket price is painful, it’s at least simple to measure. But inefficiencies that result from improper pretreatment maintenance can be deceptive. They don’t show up in one lump sum, but as a steady trickle, hour after hour, day after day continuously bleeding out. The cumulative result can be shocking, if you compare utility bills and know what to look for.

A consistent preventative maintenance program stops the bleeding and protects efficiencies across all of your systems. It’s really just a matter of smart ownership that doesn’t have to add to the complexity of your facility team’s job.

Partnering for Success

Performing preventative maintenance doesn’t have to be something extra to strap your team with. In fact, when it comes to being a dollar-smart owner of a pretreatment system, the best approach is to consider preventative maintenance not as something extra at all, but simply as part of the operating cost. When it’s done consistently by a knowledgeable partner who takes ownership of the results, those results pay for themselves many times over.

If you have any questions or would like to learn more about preventative maintenance plans, please reach out to the HOH pretreatment team or your current water quality engineer.

Find out more about our full line of Pretreatment solutions: https://hohwatertechnology.com/water-conditioning/