Charcoal Filter

[turtlemaple]

Has anyone had any experience with having a charcoal filter on an RO unit with maple sap?

We are getting an RO unit and heard there could be big issues with having chlorine with RO membranes. We have town water and can very well imagine that at some point we would need more water than what is in the permeate tank. The charcoal apparently takes out the chlorine.

My fear is that the charcoal filter might do something to the sap. Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks,

Paul and Kathy

[brookledge]

Paul
Are you going to expand your taps?
What size RO are you getting
Just make sure that you keep your RO sized to your operation and your evaporator.
What I mean is that if your 2X6 boils about 50 GPH you want to have enough sap to make it worth while to start it up and if you have 400 taps that you run through the RO and then you have 50 gal of consentrate its not real feasable to start for 1 hr but you can't keep concetrate because it will spoil.
As for the clorine. I'm assuming that only the town water that you may need to supplement for washing has clorine so just put the filter on the water supply line coming in and it should not harm the sap at all.
Maybe someone else can shed light on this but I can't see any harm using water with clorine in it for rinsing. Alot of us use it for washing tanks. The amount of clorine in your drinking water is going to be a low amount compared to when you take bleach and use to wash tanks.
Keith

[mapleguy]

My understanding is that new type membranes do not like chlorine. A carbon filter will not have any effect on the sap as carbon is an inert substance, however it will clog up faster if you run all your sap through it. Just put it on your water supply line.

[powerdub]

The only time I use town water is the very beginning and the very end (maybe) of the season. I use a carbon style filter in the beginning to clean my machine because the membranes don't like water with chlorine or high iron, which is both prevalent in town and well water around here. I have no idea why you would run sap through it? I fill the permeate tank in the beginning of the season to clean the machine and it is not used again until the end of the season if I need it.

[Russell Lampron]

It is a good idea to use the charcoal filter to filter well or town water before cleaning your RO.

Filter your sap before putting it into your storage tank with something like the pop sap filters. The pre filter for your RO should be all that you will need there to filter the sap one last time before it enters the membrane.

Russ