Industrial strength UV water purifier

If you want to remove smell and icky taste do what booze distillers do to cheaply increase the value of their product.
Run multiple charcoal filters in serries.

 

There can be no substituting the value of activated charcoal ,and I agree the UV should be the last process, in which case I believe doing it only to water that is for cooking and drinking , not for laundry or gardening.
I have a very small hand held unit for back pacing and basically they say is that it sterilizes the bacteria, not kills it. which is fine .
If it is sterilized, it can't reproduce, good as dead.

 

Last process aside from the addition of chlorine, iodine, ect.

Yes the bacteria that do survive are incapable of reproduction and have their internal repair mechanisms, aka the ability to heal destroyed.
But if there are a ton of sterile bacteria in your water they may not be able to hurt you but if you use that water on food, then store the food the survivor bacteria may be able to put off nasty byproducts that can hurt you later.

That's why I was going to use the light tube at around 60% power on a smaller tank of water. That way the bacteria will be extremely dead and not just nutered.

 

Got 2 more gently used tubes.
Yep this is going to be a thing.
So I went ahead and bought a new 1000w metal halide pulse start ballast set for HID, $70.
Since these bulbs have pretty low resistance and cut in voltage is no where near 1000v I'm going to try wiring the ballast with out the starter first. Since the starter is the part that goes bad first at least 90% of the time I will test and see if they will self start. Normally you need a starter in the bulb or the ballast to start a metal halide bulb.

 

I figured out exactly how these industrial and municipal water sterilization units work.
They take a pipe about as wide as the UV tube, put a quarts tube inside of that pipe running perpendicular to the flow of water, because the UV lamp can't come in contact with water because it gets up to around 2000°F at full power and it needs to be hot for best efficiency. Then the UV lamp goes inside the quarts tube.
Water flows through the pipe and past the UV lamp inside the quarts tube and all the bacteria, viruses and protozoa die, or at least get really messed up.
I can make a red neck version of that, now that I found a supply of quarts tubes. All I need after that is some 6 inch stainless pipe which I can get nearly for free and welder up.

 

Not really worthless, mind you, but pics of the build would be nice when you get to it!

 

The 1000w ballast ships Monday.

Idk, being able to sterilize an almost unlimited amount of water without boiling after shtf might be something that could come in handy.

Now I need to find some quartz tubes. That are the correct size. The ones I think would work are 22mm, my UV lamps measure about 7/8 of an inch or about 21.5mm in diameter which really doesn't leave any room for error.
That's like 10 thousands of an inch around the lamp.
I will need to put a dial caliper on the lamp to make sure.

So far the total bill looks like it's could be well under $200 if I can find a quartz tube with out having to buy 1 meter or more.

 

I found some more technical info on these lamps.
They are medium pressure lamps, 256nm peak spectrum.
The difference between low, medium and high pressure is how intense the light your tube puts off.
Examples, low pressure = neon light, medium pressure = street light, high pressure = maybe a laser.

I have been looking at some of the house hold UV units. Well those are any where from 6 to 50 watts. They are almost like a toy compared to the tubes I have.

I have a relative that works on these. I knew my great uncle worked at a "water treatment plant" I always assumed that meant a sewage treatment plant. No its a drinking water plant for a small city in maine and they use something like this. He has some pictures of it in action.

 

Visual aid:
The UV lamp in its natural state.

The unit it's self looks futuristic.


Flow rate 450 to 500gpm.

 

I ordered the 1,000w ballast transformer.
It arrived and was not a pulse start. They sent the wrong one.
So I wired it up any ways to try it since this alloy vapor lamp requires a pretty low flash over voltage of around 400v. Well the open current voltage on this ballast is about 440v.
And it works.
They say it produces Ozone and you can smell it.

It's so bright it over loads the camera.
It absolutely works with out pulse start.
Powering one of these lamps up in open air at this power level is incredibly dangerous.

 

Since I have the electrical portion sorted I am taking the tube I slightly burned up and I am testing for longevity by powering it up and turning it off. These industrial tubed are really meant to be turned on ran at near full power continously.

Now the only thing is to get the UV lamp inside of a vessel of water.
To get the UV lamp in side of a vessel of water I have not exactly figured out how yet. It will involve a quarts tube. Just like they use in residential and industrial UV water purifiers.

 

Just remember, OP4.....if you accidentally invent the light saber, us Monkeys get first dibs at any extra tubes, and the plans, first!

 

I have been testing with the 1kw ballast transformer.
At full power the amps come down to about 4.7a at the bulb.
On start up they run around 5.5 to 6 amps.
I have wired the ballast for 240v operation.
The ballast transformer runs really cool in open air. I show 120°F on a 40°F night on my flir i7.

You have to make sure the bulb is not touching anything or mercury vapor will condens where the bulb touches that something. Then it just takes longer to get up to full power where all the mercury is vaporized.

So to ensure fast starting with out a pulse start ignition make sure the bulb is sitting level so all the mercury vapor can condense along the bottom of the bulb and not accumulate into one big lump.
If all the mecury is in one lump it may not come on right away.

 

About 290 gallons per minute.

It would be a complete waste of money to use this on a 5-10gal per minute household system. Even getting it down to 400watts means you're still running about 10kwhrs/day just for this. Here, that is 90 cents/day, or $27 bucks/mo for capacity you don't need.

Something like this is for a bottling plant or small brewery.

 

Or water municipality.

So you say it's too powerful and will use too much power.
Well you are exactly right and I never said to run it continuously.
In an earlier post I had said that I spent a few days cycling power on, letting the lamp come up to temperature and turning it off. To make sure it could handle lots of cycling.

The idea isn't to run it continuously while you flow a pedestrian 0 to 2 gallons per minute by it.
It would be more of a water heater than anything and be a waste of power most of all.

My idea is you run it while transferring water from one container to another.
Or periodically lower the tube into your water tank and fire it up and run it for 10 or 20 minutes while agitating and bubbling air into the water.
(Do not leave the tube in water as water gunk and slime will build up on the tube while it's powered down, a little bit of build up will kill your UV transmission rate).

Another technical note I found was the warm up time for these is 4 minutes.

Also these do something home UV water sterilization units dont. This 256nm peak spectrum light was specifically chosen because it makes a lot of ozone only problem is it also deactivates active chlorine.
So for a home unit the deactivation of chlorine could have a lot of liability connected to it and customers would likley complain about the Ozone smell.

The half life of ozone at room temperature is only about 45 minutes, thats why when you buy Ozone treated water there isn't actually any Ozone in it by the time it gets on the store shelves.
So unlike a home owner UV set this industrial UV tube keeps killing stuff even after its turned off.

 

There should be some dissolved oxygen in the water to allow for the formation of Ozone.
I also mentioned agitation vigorously enough to cause some air bubbling. If you have air bubbles then you definitely have enough air present in the water to make Ozone.
Then Ozone solubility in water is around 1g per L.
So if you can create Ozone in water it will dissolve into the water very rapidly.

I have a 33mm out side diameter, 30mm inside diameter open ended 300mm long quartz tube on order for my pass though water sterilizer.

The tank dip sterilizer, will need a longer tube sealed at one end.

 

It took a while but I finally have 5 or 6 more tubes on the way. I also picked up a 1.5kw ballast to bring it up to full power, because it will look cool.

I started out with 4 tubes, fried 1, then accidentally broke 2.

 

They use those UV lights in restaurants and medical manufacturing facilities every where you walk in and out.
I have a small battery powered one for treating meats and another for dipping in water (Steripen). It has a lens over it , so glass does not stop the light. further more it does not kill the bacteria , it sterilizes it so that it cannot reproduce. it's still alive till it's life cycle is complete and dies of old age.
While treating water it needs to be a free of debris /particulates as possible, because bacteria can hide on the inside of debris and not get exposed.
I'm not sure what our going after with all this high powered stuff , but I'm interested.
.