Author Topic: Giga's Water Treatment Lab Nearly Complete  (Read 4021 times)

GigaBuist

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Giga's Water Treatment Lab Nearly Complete
« on: January 23, 2017, 09:29:17 PM »
So... we totally revamped the way we take water into the greenhouse this winter and it's almost nearly complete.  It's functional enough at this point that we're bringing in plant material and it can clean up to 100 gallons per minute of surface water.  I'm just posting this to see if there's ANY interest of a video tour of the whole thing.

The rundown:

Rainwater is collected in a pond that's about 3 acres in surface area.  It's usually about 4' deep.  That then flows into a 24" drain tile tube with 0.25" holes all over and covered with about 18" of pea gravel which gravity feeds into a concrete cylinder below the ground of of the barn that now houses water treatment.  A 5HP pump lifts it up from the underground tank and pushes it into a sulfuric acid injection system which then feeds into our existing ozone sanitation system.  And by "existing" I mean we rebuilt the whole thing and turned it into a frankenmonster.  First step is going through glass filter tanks, which are basically just water softener tanks filled with a different media, then we inject ozone gas into the water, then back through glass.

And then we stick chlorine gas into the water.  Yep.  I've got 300lbs of chlorine gas on hand.  It's awesome.  The chlorine gas is why we do the acid injection as the first step because if your water is acidic (like pH of 6.5 to be safe) your H20 + Cl2 reaction gets you HOCl and HCl, the important one being HOCl as it's a great oxidizer that kills stuff.  If your water is alkaline the H gets ripped off the HOCl and you end up with OCl which is an OK oxidizer but only about 1/30th as effective as HOCl.  Ozone is better than both but you have to generate that on site and while I've seriously upped our ozone generation system we have no idea if it's enough so the chlorine gas is the backup.  I could go on more but I won't.

From there the purified water then dumps into a 55,000 gallon tank.  That tank feeds a 25hp variable motor that then goes through a slew of gymnastics feeding it into another round of acid, if we want, more HOCl if we want, and then into fertilizer.  Along the way there's a slew of bypasses and blending tubes where we go from 4" up to 6" or from 6" up to 8" just to slow down the water and force it to blend a bit. 

If anybody is interested in a video showing it all working I'll try and shoot one soon.

cordex

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Re: Giga's Water Treatment Lab Nearly Complete
« Reply #1 on: January 24, 2017, 02:12:03 AM »
I think it would be really interesting to see a video if you have time to make one.

Fly320s

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Re: Giga's Water Treatment Lab Nearly Complete
« Reply #2 on: January 24, 2017, 06:42:46 AM »
How pure is the purified water as it goes into the 55,000 gallon tank?  Drinkable?

Also, why do you want purified water for plants?  Isn't lightly filtered good enough?
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Re: Giga's Water Treatment Lab Nearly Complete
« Reply #3 on: January 24, 2017, 10:20:45 AM »
I would like to see a video. I dream about doing a hippie rain collection system, my small property has 4 large roofs and ought to collect enough water to support a small pond and water for gardens.
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RevDisk

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Re: Giga's Water Treatment Lab Nearly Complete
« Reply #4 on: January 24, 2017, 11:43:23 AM »
Very interested. I'm gathering you didn't want to rely on a well or public water supply. Makes absolute sense that you don't want parasites, pollutants or other contamination getting into your supply. If you need a purification system, might as well get it to potable water stage. Or do you keep your bathrooms, water fountains, sinks, etc on a separate system?

Do you have sensors built in yet? Seems like even dissolved ozone, flow, temp and Ph sensors would give you warm fuzzy feelings about the efficiency of your process. They're relative cheap for the piece of mind you'd get. After that, you'd solely need to send spot samples off to the labs for more detailed analysis.


Now, this is going to be a completely left field notion, but any reason why you went with this instead of say partial vacuum distillation or vapor compression evaporation? Wouldn't matter WHAT the source feed was contaminated with, it wouldn't come across the water. You'd probably want to add some stuff to the distilled water (trace minerals or whatnot), but it'd be a very very simple process that wouldn't require an ozone generator, chlorine, Ph sensitivity, etc. Your current setup is great for dealing with biological contamination, but not necessarily particulates, chemicals, metals, etc. I know you went your route specifically and looked at alternatives, and I'm guessing acid sanitizor/o3/chlorine due to flow rate and cost. But still curious, because... well, curious.  =D
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GigaBuist

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Re: Giga's Water Treatment Lab Nearly Complete
« Reply #5 on: January 24, 2017, 09:23:34 PM »
How pure is the purified water as it goes into the 55,000 gallon tank?  Drinkable?

Yep, drinkable.  Beyond that actually.  ORP is used to measure how much reactive oxygen is available in the water.  If you can hold your water to an ORP ov 700mV for like 0.5 seconds (maybe it's two seconds) you're basically sure you've killed everything.  That's what's done to bottled water in the US with ozone.  Even if the stuff is totally drinkable they still ozinate it to get the ORP high enough that they're SURE it's clean.

Right now I run my pond water up to an ORP of 700 and then chlorine goes in.  The ozone goes away but the chlorine's HCl and HOCl remain around, semi-stable.  When the ozone is gone I'm STILL at an ORP of 700 and holding it there... which relates to your next question.

Also, why do you want purified water for plants?  Isn't lightly filtered good enough?

We're afraid of any fungal pathogens or algae sneaking in.  Plus we've also got some biofilm in our pipes from previous year. A common remedy for that is to spike your water with an oxidizer before sending it down the like.  Hydrogen peroxcide and hypchlorous acid (HOCl) can be used for this but they're expensive.  Ozone works too but peters out too quick to do us any good.  Lines are too long.  Chlorine is nice because, well, it turns into HOCl and instead of spending $20k a year on the actual acid in dilute form we can generate out own from $900 in chlorine gas.


Mod Edit: Fixed a close quote tag. - Rev
« Last Edit: January 25, 2017, 11:04:41 AM by RevDisk »

Perd Hapley

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Re: Giga's Water Treatment Lab Nearly Complete
« Reply #6 on: January 24, 2017, 09:42:00 PM »
How is your system set up to deal with the large amounts of human waste you guys have laying all over the place there?  
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Re: Giga's Water Treatment Lab Nearly Complete
« Reply #7 on: January 24, 2017, 09:50:52 PM »
How is your system set up to deal with the large amounts of human waste you guys have laying all over the place there?  

They have a special tank just for the checkout lines.
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GigaBuist

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Re: Giga's Water Treatment Lab Nearly Complete
« Reply #8 on: January 24, 2017, 09:51:38 PM »
Very interested. I'm gathering you didn't want to rely on a well or public water supply. Makes absolute sense that you don't want parasites, pollutants or other contamination getting into your supply. If you need a purification system, might as well get it to potable water stage. Or do you keep your bathrooms, water fountains, sinks, etc on a separate system?

Potable water comes from a deep well that's adequate for our flow needs.  Part of the problem with our land is the deep wells could only get 15-18 gallons per minute and we need 100 gpm coming in.  We can burn 400-500gpm hence the 55k gallon tank.

Public water was going to be $370k to $800k to pipe in, plus the actual monthly bills.  


Do you have sensors built in yet? Seems like even dissolved ozone, flow, temp and Ph sensors would give you warm fuzzy feelings about the efficiency of your process. They're relative cheap for the piece of mind you'd get. After that, you'd solely need to send spot samples off to the labs for more detailed analysis.

Dissolved ozone you can't really do... dissolved oxygen you can but ozone is different.  We use ORP to indirectly measure that... but the nice thing is it also measures other oxidizers.  So I can do ORP post ozone and ORP post chlorine and it's all kind of meaning the same thing.  Temp I don't really care about and flow is tricky because the flow sensors we do use don't have any computer interface to them.  Kinda stupid but that's how it goes.

But for pH and ORP it'd be nice to have a system that could sample every 5 seconds, log it to MySQL, have the ability to operate a solenoid to turn the chlorine pressure either on or off.  On if ozone isn't enough and back off if the chlorine ORP is getting too high.  Then it'd be really nice if there was a web interface so I could check on the thing from my phone and if the same relay board that was working the solenoid could also close a loop to trigger a Sensaphone to call out if things got REALLY bad that'd be great.  If only.


Oh yeah.. built one!  Not seen is the 24VAC transformer or any wiring into the relay module.


Now, this is going to be a completely left field notion, but any reason why you went with this instead of say partial vacuum distillation or vapor compression evaporation? Wouldn't matter WHAT the source feed was contaminated with, it wouldn't come across the water. You'd probably want to add some stuff to the distilled water (trace minerals or whatnot), but it'd be a very very simple process that wouldn't require an ozone generator, chlorine, Ph sensitivity, etc. Your current setup is great for dealing with biological contamination, but not necessarily particulates, chemicals, metals, etc. I know you went your route specifically and looked at alternatives, and I'm guessing acid sanitizor/o3/chlorine due to flow rate and cost. But still curious, because... well, curious.  =D

Never really thought about one.  It's not something I've seen on the market for ag purposes and I can guess why.  You actually want some of the metals and other impurities in your water.  Plus you still need something like chlorine or another oxidizer to clean the pipes out and pH/alakalinity management is always needed.  If you went with distilled water that was balls even 7.0 pH and then you put your fertilizer in you'll knock the pH down.  With no alkaline particulates in the water (like calcium chloride) you'd eventually "eat" the lime buffer put in potting soil down and drive the pH of the soil too low for some crops.  Geraniums are going to be the first to show it if your pH gets too low.  

So, you end up doing this weird balance with pH where you try and keep the pH of the water around the 6.5 to 7.0 range but you leave enough alkaline particles in the water to replace the lime in the soil as you water.  Target range is usually 60-80ppm alkalinity in the water. Higher than that and you can experience some build up. Lower and you strip the medium.

I swear I do more math and science in Ag than I did in IT.

I'll try and pop a cell phone video out tomorrow.

TechMan

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Re: Giga's Water Treatment Lab Nearly Complete
« Reply #9 on: January 24, 2017, 10:42:00 PM »
This is how I imagine Giga:
Quote
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230RN

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Re: Giga's Water Treatment Lab Nearly Complete
« Reply #10 on: January 24, 2017, 11:18:27 PM »
Huh!  Learned a lot, thanks!

One thing, as I looked up ozone generators, was:

Quote
Some cold plasma [ozone generation] units also have the capability of producing short-lived allotropes of oxygen which include O4, O5, O6, O7, etc. These species are even more reactive than ordinary O3.  [72] (WIKI)

Didn't know oxygen had higher allotropes than O3.  I'd bet they are pretty reactive.

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Re: Giga's Water Treatment Lab Nearly Complete
« Reply #11 on: January 25, 2017, 08:06:22 AM »
Justin do you have a facebook page for the nursery?  You could probably garner a pretty decent following with the goings on and interesting projects you do there.
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Re: Giga's Water Treatment Lab Nearly Complete
« Reply #12 on: January 25, 2017, 09:34:24 AM »
Most of our plants that can do so don't use chlorine gas.  We just get a 10% bleach mixture delivered and use peristaltic metering pumps to feed it in.  Chlorine gas is regulated.  You have be careful how much you have on site and have special safety equipment.  The one site I recall using it had very large cooling towers and used the big chlorine cylinders that need a forklift to move.
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GigaBuist

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Re: Giga's Water Treatment Lab Nearly Complete
« Reply #13 on: January 25, 2017, 09:31:48 PM »
Justin do you have a facebook page for the nursery?  You could probably garner a pretty decent following with the goings on and interesting projects you do there.

We do, 12k followers.  I tend to agree that we should post some of the off-season back story stuff to keep people interested, but the reality is most of our followers are 35-65 year old women that currently react best to pictures of flowers.  But, that's a chicken and egg thing.  Guys don't react much to our posts because unless they're really into flowers there's nothing of interest to them.  Some off season stuff like showing 9 semi loads of compressed potting soil in the parking lot imprints a sense that we're doing something _big_ over here.  Showing the pile of steel pieces that's delivered in the summer before assembly and then what it looks like after is also impressive. 

The rainwater capture and ozone treatment is some nice PR because it's pretty low impact on the environment.  Even the greenhouse waste water is put into a pond that's used for field irrigation so all of the fertilizer gets a second chance to be used up before any runoff hits streams.  Ozone just turns back into oxygen when it's done.  The only dirty thing in the whole process is we use some electricity.   Chlorine is probably a harder sale to the public...

Oh, video is being put to YouTube.  Not sure it'll get up there tonight yet.  One of them I didn't speak in because I doubt you'd hear me so I'll have to dub in audio or just closed caption the thing.  Probably just CC it.

GigaBuist

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Re: Giga's Water Treatment Lab Nearly Complete
« Reply #14 on: January 26, 2017, 06:24:57 PM »
Video 1:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq0M72BRuWI

Doesn't cover ozone creation, just kinda how the water flow goes.

GigaBuist

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Re: Giga's Water Treatment Lab Nearly Complete
« Reply #15 on: January 26, 2017, 10:00:53 PM »
This is how I imagine Giga:


More like this:



never_retreat

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Re: Giga's Water Treatment Lab Nearly Complete
« Reply #16 on: January 26, 2017, 10:50:02 PM »
Video 1:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq0M72BRuWI

Doesn't cover ozone creation, just kinda how the water flow goes.
Cool Video. Definitely too nerdy for most non APS types.

Just don't let OSHA see it.
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never_retreat

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Re: Giga's Water Treatment Lab Nearly Complete
« Reply #17 on: January 26, 2017, 11:26:40 PM »
How do you maintain the water pressure? I saw no pressure tank. Is that last pump on a vfd?
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RoadKingLarry

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Re: Giga's Water Treatment Lab Nearly Complete
« Reply #18 on: January 27, 2017, 01:15:14 AM »
Ought to consider offering Flint consulting services.
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cordex

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Re: Giga's Water Treatment Lab Nearly Complete
« Reply #19 on: January 27, 2017, 02:41:00 AM »
Very cool video. Thanks.

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Re: Giga's Water Treatment Lab Nearly Complete
« Reply #20 on: January 27, 2017, 08:33:04 AM »
More like this:


So, just trade in the glasses for goggles and he got it?
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GigaBuist

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Re: Giga's Water Treatment Lab Nearly Complete
« Reply #21 on: January 27, 2017, 03:45:13 PM »
How do you maintain the water pressure? I saw no pressure tank. Is that last pump on a vfd?

Both.. there's a pressure tank and a VFD controller.


Pressure tank on left... line goes out to:


Saddle valve coming off the 6" pipe hooking it to the pressure tank and the transducer/pressure sensor screws in the top so the controller know's what's going on.


grampster

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Re: Giga's Water Treatment Lab Nearly Complete
« Reply #22 on: January 29, 2017, 11:04:54 PM »
We buy stuff at Giga's greenhouse every year.  I can assure you that he wanders aimlessly around mumbling, talking to himself and giggling, dragging a hose that doesn't seem to be connected to anything. :laugh: :laugh:
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RevDisk

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Re: Giga's Water Treatment Lab Nearly Complete
« Reply #23 on: January 30, 2017, 11:25:08 AM »
Potable water comes from a deep well that's adequate for our flow needs.  Part of the problem with our land is the deep wells could only get 15-18 gallons per minute and we need 100 gpm coming in.  We can burn 400-500gpm hence the 55k gallon tank.

Public water was going to be $370k to $800k to pipe in, plus the actual monthly bills.  


Dissolved ozone you can't really do... dissolved oxygen you can but ozone is different.  We use ORP to indirectly measure that... but the nice thing is it also measures other oxidizers.  So I can do ORP post ozone and ORP post chlorine and it's all kind of meaning the same thing.  Temp I don't really care about and flow is tricky because the flow sensors we do use don't have any computer interface to them.  Kinda stupid but that's how it goes.

But for pH and ORP it'd be nice to have a system that could sample every 5 seconds, log it to MySQL, have the ability to operate a solenoid to turn the chlorine pressure either on or off.  On if ozone isn't enough and back off if the chlorine ORP is getting too high.  Then it'd be really nice if there was a web interface so I could check on the thing from my phone and if the same relay board that was working the solenoid could also close a loop to trigger a Sensaphone to call out if things got REALLY bad that'd be great.  If only.

https://s29.postimg.org/xetsr0zyf/orpbot_sm.jpg
Oh yeah.. built one!  Not seen is the 24VAC transformer or any wiring into the relay module.

 =D

That makes absolute sense. And good choice, Sensaphones aren't cheap but they're very reliable.

We need a video walkthrough of this as well. Chop, chop!


Never really thought about one.  It's not something I've seen on the market for ag purposes and I can guess why.  You actually want some of the metals and other impurities in your water.  Plus you still need something like chlorine or another oxidizer to clean the pipes out and pH/alakalinity management is always needed.  If you went with distilled water that was balls even 7.0 pH and then you put your fertilizer in you'll knock the pH down.  With no alkaline particulates in the water (like calcium chloride) you'd eventually "eat" the lime buffer put in potting soil down and drive the pH of the soil too low for some crops.  Geraniums are going to be the first to show it if your pH gets too low.  

So, you end up doing this weird balance with pH where you try and keep the pH of the water around the 6.5 to 7.0 range but you leave enough alkaline particles in the water to replace the lime in the soil as you water.  Target range is usually 60-80ppm alkalinity in the water. Higher than that and you can experience some build up. Lower and you strip the medium.

I swear I do more math and science in Ag than I did in IT.

I'll try and pop a cell phone video out tomorrow.

Was just curious. Last fluid automation I worked with was for alcohol and they were using city water. They essentially stripped out everything to scratch, and then added the trace minerals in controlled amount. As the plants probably aren't going to complain about the taste, probably not highest priority.   =D

Awesome job, Giga.



We buy stuff at Giga's greenhouse every year.  I can assure you that he wanders aimlessly around mumbling, talking to himself and giggling, dragging a hose that doesn't seem to be connected to anything. :laugh: :laugh:

Yes, but is he properly muttering "They laughed at me, well, who's laughing now?" followed by insane laughter?
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RevDisk

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Re: Giga's Water Treatment Lab Nearly Complete
« Reply #24 on: January 30, 2017, 11:29:54 AM »
Ought to consider offering Flint consulting services.

Actually, kinda sorta knew some folks who were expected to bid on the Flint remediation. They took a long look and then refused to bid. Local government is too screwed up and stupid, potential for bad PR, the timelines involved are unrealistic, angry locals. Everyone big enough to do the job right is looking at it and passing.

The margins are way too low to make it worth the risk.
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