Homemade RO Procon Pump 3012 Housings

[deerhut]

Hi! Be easy on me as this is my first time posting. :) I have a procon 101D100F11BD(100 GPH) pump hooked up to a 1/3hp motor. I have two RO membranes(3012 housings)(300 GPD) each attached in parallel. I originally set this system up to run two sets of these in parallel for a total of four membranes(have never tried this though). Just for fun i just hooked up the two membranes but i seem to have so much flow that even if i have my needle valve all the way open i still see 125 psi and the flow is crazy. I take little water out and increase the sugar just a little. Works better if i recirculate. There seems to be a lot of forums with too small of pumps, but wondering if i am doing damage by running too much pump and if i just need to use the other two membranes to take up some of the flow or maybe even more membranes. Thanks in advance for any insight. First year running this ro system.

[Drew Pond Maple]

I too had thought of this set up a few months back but have been hesitant to follow through building one. I searched threads here on MT back to 2014 and found almost nothing. I did find that AMI residential membranes are rated at max feed flow rate of 2gpm https://www.appliedmembranes.com/media/wysiwyg/pdf/membranes/ami_home_ro_membrane_elements.pdf
So a procon 125 would be right at the upper limits of the membranes. My plan was to use a procon 80-100gph and 4 or 5 400gpd membranes in series at 125-130psi. My current RO 4x150gpd with aquqtec 8800 can run at 125psi but flow slows way down. I need something with a little more flow but not ready for a 4x40 yet
One thing that comes to mind with the higher pressure could be that the 1/4” concentrate and permeate ports on the membranes are just too restrictive for 100gph even though they’re rated for it. Don’t know if this helps or not
Hopefully others with more knowledge will chime in cuz I’m curious if this system will work.

[MapleCamp]

I think you will be much happier with that procon set up if you put it on a 4 by 40 , and have a by pass or recirc on the cons line. I have a small pro con with a 1/3hp and get about 20 gph at 10% cons. I run it around 170-180 psi.

[MajorWoodchuck]

I have this similar setup new for this year, running a 1/3 HP Procon 120GPH pump going through 6 of the 400GPD membranes in series. Got my motor from a soda fountain carbonator but burned up my original carbonator pump last year running it dry. Making sure this wasn’t repeated, I put a 3 GPM feed 12v pump (Amazon) before the Procon with a pressure switch - shutting off the Procon when feed pressure dropped below 5psi. I ran the feed pump on a variable power supply so I could dial it in to have about 15psi feeding the Prcon. I ran 110PSI on my needle valve and then had a recirculation line feeding back to the input of my Procon pump, with another valve controlling how much flow I fed my evaporator. I ran a 10ft copper line inside my exhaust stack as a preheater, so I could dial in exactly the flow I wanted out to achieve 150-200 degree feed for my pans and everything else would go to recirculation. I measured sap going in at about 38 GPH and concentrated 1.5% sap into 6% going into my boilers. I have the equivalent of 5 hotel pans for boiling, so I assume I was boiling off at 10 GPH. This system worked great after getting the kinks out (keeping the filter screen that was on the suction line cleaned after every 55 barrel and adding an extra cooing fan for the feed pump). I did not notice any degradation in RO performance from the start to the end of a 400 gallon boil. My setup was mounted in a plywood box I made that was lined with 3/4" Styrofoam with two doors that could be closed and a 25 watt light bulb on a freeze protection plug kept my system from freezing during the weekdays i was not there. I ran all 3/8" OD lines except for 1/4" permeate lines initially coming out of each membrane.https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipPgDYjSId36ye2uVpQWCCFLsamMOVBtrmlf4EX4