Customer Description

A vegetable canning company located in central Wisconsin cans vegetables 4-5 months out of the year. They spend the rest of the year working on preventive maintenance projects for the next canning season.

The Challenge

The local municipal waste treatment plant could no longer handle the regeneration effluent from the plant’s water softeners due to the high chloride discharge content mandated by the Wisconsin DNR. The water softeners were the main treatment for the canning company’s boilers, used to produce steam for the canning process. The average usage of soft water in the plant is 135,000 gallons a day and the majority of the soft water is for boiler feed. The plant was using approximately 1300 pounds of salt per day.

Total Water’s Solution

Total Water designed a 200-gallon per minute reverse osmosis (RO) system that would take the place of the water softeners. The pretreatment equipment to the reverse osmosis unit consists of carbon filtration and an antiscalant feed system. The carbon filters are equipped with an air injection system for the removal of chlorine and oxidized iron from the plant’s well water. The carbon filter media is Calgon Centaur carbon. Following the carbon filters is an antiscalant feed system to help prevent the RO membranes from hardness fouling. Post reverse osmosis water treatment consists of a manually regenerated polishing water softener. The polishing softener only requires one regeneration for the entire season. After the new system was installed the customer noticed significant savings in softener salt and fuel for the boilers. Contact the experts at Total Water today to find out how we can engineer savings into your water treatment system.