Amount of permeate for wash and rinse?

[doocat]

I will be running about 800 taps this coming season on vacuum. I just purchased a used R/O. It is a 600 gph machine. (was a good deal so I went with it even though it is big).

Is there a potential that I will not produce enough permeate for rinse? Also, if I get a large permeate tank can you store the permeate to use for consecutive days.

How much permeate will a 600 gph Airablo machine use for a rinse and wash cycle.

Thanks.

[emericksmaple]

We have a 600 gal an hr Springtech machine. My suggestion would be for you to buy a 1000-1200 gal tank. I know it sounds large but the more water you can have to rinse it with the better. We have an 1100 gal plastic that we have setting outside the camp that we use. If yours is like ours it has a wash tank built in to it. They recomennd that you run 300 gal or more through after a wash. But with your large machine and only 800 taps you should only have to wash it 2-3 times max during season. But you want to rinse it everynight. As for storing it for a couple of days you can if you want to. We used to when we had a tank inside and saw that there would be no sap running for a couple of days, but now with it outside we empty it every night.

[ennismaple]

I agree that you want to wash with as much permeate as possible and as often as possible to prevent the membrane from getting clogged. We have an old 500 gallon SS milk tank that we store the permeate from our 600 gph RO in for washing. We do a full wash cycle every day. Generally, if we don't have enough sap to get enough permeate for a full wash cycle we don't run the RO that day - we'll just boil the sap the old fashioned way!

[Fred Henderson]

Could someone please explain to me what permeate is. I am not new to sugaring just new to RO's.

[lew]

permeate is the water you take out of the sap with the RO. Basically it's the "junk" in our business, but very essential to rinse the RO with. As far as size of permeate tank and amount to run thruogh your machine, the more the better. We have an old B-600 Coster that runs between 800 and 900 gallons an hour. We try to save all the permeate we can. Before our downsizing we had a 4,000 gallon permeater tank. When we got done running the sap and we were just boiling we would run the rinse cycle till we were done boiling. If that meant 2 hours of rinsing, so be it. The more rinsing the bettter. We would empty it on extremely cold nights to prevent problems and we had a heat tape on the RO permeate feed line just in case.

[Russell Lampron]

The water that is removed from the sap is called filtrate or permeate. The condensed sap is called condensate or concentrate. If we used our RO machines to purify water the filtrate would be the stuff we would bottle and sell and the concentrate would be the junk. In our industry we turn the junk into liquid gold and basically discard what would be the gold in another industry.

I agree that more is better when it comes to cleaning and rinsing the machine. Follow the manufactures recommended amount of water for rinsing for a minimum tank size and go bigger from there. I wash mine with soap after every use and use my soap mixture 3 times. I have now upgraded to a 550 gallon tank for my filtrate water.

Russ