How to Remove Boiler Scale

You just opened the boiler for inspection and you have scale and now the boiler inspector just recommended acid cleaning the boiler in order to keep your certificate. Now what?

This is becoming a more frequent common trend as insurance companies tend to protect their interest.
The first thing you must address prior to spending any money, is determine why the boiler scaled. These are general rules you should start with:

CONSUMER REPORTS WATER SOFTENERS

1) You should always use a softener system on your make-up water. Chemicals should be used with the softener. Chemicals are used as a polisher to remove the minimal calcium or otherwise referred to as hardness that has surpassed the softener. Realistically, a softener will never remove all hardness from your makeup water.
2) Perform daily hardness tests on the softener to ensure it is functioning properly.
3) Perform daily hardness tests to the boiler water. Remember a test is a snap shot of what is happening at that moment of time. There is a number of things that can go wrong causing the softener to malfunction between tests. Performing a test on the boiler water will provide a more general feed back on how the softener perform between tests.
4) If you do have periodic hardness spikes on your boiler water test. Have the softener serviced or replaced. If you have a critical boiler system consider using a dual softener system. The dual system with two softeners in series, where the first softener is automatically regenerated and the second tank is manually regenerated once a month.
5) Have one dedicated maintenance or engineer be fully responsible for boiler testing. Have back up personnel trained to support the leader. From experience, training 3, 5, or 10 or training the entire maintenance to perform testing will rarely work. One person needs to be responsible and held accountable for testing and reporting.
6) Crease log sheets and save your reports. Free templates are available online. The inspector will look for log sheets after seeing scale in the boiler in order to determine if anyone has been performing tests and if the boiler is being ignored.
7) The operator must give the log sheet to a supervisor or engineer for weekly review.

Acid cleaning is expensive if done correctly. Last month a scaled boiler was quoted ,000 to acid clean a 200 hp boiler. Twenty four 55 gallon drums of sulfonic acid were required to effectively remove all the scale. The boiler inspector with 40 years experience demanded the boiler be acid cleaned to maintain the boiler certificate until the inspector seen the costs. This was a waste recovery boiler so the loss of efficiency was not as important. A more common boiler with 1/8" scale would have increased energy costs by nearly 20%, so acid cleaning would have be justified.

Instead of acid cleaning the boiler, we proposed the following to the inspector and it was accepted as an alternative plan:

1) Implementation of an acidic polymer. An acidic polymer is used as a gradually way to slowly dissolved the scale. The acid polymer is fed 14 ppm per hardness part in the boiler. For example, if your boiler water has 10 ppm of hardness you should maintain 140 ppm of polymer, The acidic polymer is molybdate traced for ease of testing.

2) We implemented steps 1 through 7 above.

How to Remove Boiler Scale

CONSUMER REPORTS WATER SOFTENERS

9 Ways to Remove Iron From Water

Iron in water is a very common problem and there are a couple of ways to remove it from water. The problem is that many times people looking for iron water treatment systems end up buying iron water filtering systems that are ineffective. This article will briefly explain ways to remove this mineral from water according to the type of iron in the water.

Before we look at the types of treatment we need to know that the types or iron fall into 2 main categories.

CONSUMER REPORTS WATER SOFTENERS

1. Soluble Form known as Ferris Iron

2. Insoluble Form known as ferrous iron. This includes organic iron. Within this insoluble form is iron bacteria.

Ways to Remove Iron From Water:

Aeration: The method of putting oxygen into the water source to convert the mineral from soluble to insoluble form.

Iron Filtration: A system is used to trap and filter away oxidized bits of iron.

Water Softener: Ion replacement of Calcium and Magnesium through a chemical matrix of sodium ions

Manganese Greensand - This filtration system involves a chemical oxidation reduction process of soluble iron and helps to filter this new insoluble form.

Catalytic Filtration - This is a granular filter medium that increases the reaction of oxygen and iron to form a substance which is then filtered

Ozonation - This is a type of aeration treatment system which converts the soluble form of the mineral into it's insoluble form.

Ion Exchange - Replacing soluble iron with an ion such as sodium

Sequestering - A term used to describe the addition of chemicals to stop metals such as iron from mixing and causing the typical staining problems.

Chlorination - Used to kill iron bacteria or is used to convert the ferric iron into the ferrous iron form which is the filterable form.

The type of treatment is thus determined by the levels and type of the mineral in the water. It is best to get your water tested by a professional body instead of drawing your own conclusions. Also consider the possibility of iron in the well water and whether the option of digging a whole new well might be cheaper than an filter for well water.

9 Ways to Remove Iron From Water

CONSUMER REPORTS WATER SOFTENERS

How to Remove Iron From Drinking Water - Simple Facts

Iron is one of the numerous water contaminants that is not healthy on your part if its level of contamination in the water is quite high; that is why many individuals want to know how to remove iron from drinking water in order to make the water potable and safe for household consumption. Take note that you can easily detect if the water has excessive amounts of iron because its taste is somewhat metallic.

Cooking food using water with a high iron content will also make your food easily turn black; aside from making your food look bad. More importantly, there are several health risks involved in taking in too much iron through drinking. Hence, you must be all the more vigilant with regards to iron content in order to avoid acquiring various forms of health issues and problems as a result of too much iron intake.

CONSUMER REPORTS WATER SOFTENERS

Therefore, it is best to know how to remove iron from drinking water because this information is greatly beneficial in your end; considering the fact that water is one of the basics things for survival, and everyday we are drinking a couple of glasses in order to quench our thirsts.

Fortunately today, removal of iron is quite easy to do; thanks to the most recent advancements that make this process available for everyone to perform right in their own house. All you have to do is to get one of the filtration systems that also cover iron removal; thereby effectively transforming your contaminated tap water into potable drinking water that is very safe to drink.

Keep in mind that there are several types water filtration systems; one of the highly effective types that can also remove iron from drinking water is one that uses reverse osmosis. This process has been in use for quite some time now. In fact, the method is based on the same principle of desalinating salt water into drinking water. Similarly, this system is also effective in sorting out iron from water; hence, you can select this type of filtration if you want to resolve your problem on how to remove iron from drinking water. Another one is a run of the mill water softener that uses carbon filters and salt.

Nevertheless, you have utmost flexibility on your choices; considering that there are numerous types of water filtration systems. What is important is to select the right type that effectively removes iron as well as purifying your water.

How to Remove Iron From Drinking Water - Simple Facts

CONSUMER REPORTS WATER SOFTENERS