Purification Process
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“Your Tap water may be legally safe, but is not purified.” Aqua Blue Water & Filtration uses the latest state of the art technology for its purification process. Metro Vancouver supplied water goes through a series of purification steps before it is bottled for your family’s safe consumption.
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Sediment Filters
The purification process starts with source water receiving sediment filtration in a series of multi-media filters. These filters contain several types of media and gravel under bedding. Multi-media filtration is a proven sediment removal design; the coarse media layers in the top of the tank trap large particles, and successively smaller particles are trapped in the finer layers of media deeper in the bed. The result is a highly efficient filtering since removal takes place throughout the entire bed. Multi-Media depth filters typically remove particles 5-15 microns in size or larger. (see “How Big is a Micron?”)
Carbon Filters
The water then goes through an activated carbon tank where carbon is used to remove chlorine, organics, color, tannins, and objectionable tastes and odors within the water.
All three filters are automatically backwashed to remove these trapped contaminants within the filter bed nightly.
Particle Filters
The raw unprotected water then passes through a 1 micron nominal sediment filter. The nominal cartridge rating refers to the filter’s capacity to prevent 90% of the contaminants larger than 1 micron rating from passing through the filter. This filter brings the size of contaminants in the water from 5 micron down to 1 micron.
The next filter is a 1 micron absolute sediment filter. The absolute cartridge rating refers to the filter’s capacity to prevent any 1 micron sized contaminant or larger from passing through the filter. This secondary 1 micron filter is used prevent any remaining particles larger than 1 micron from entering the Reverse Osmosis stage.
Reverse Osmosis
Now that the water has been processed through the pre-treatment plant the water is now ready for the heart of the system: the Reverse Osmosis process. Reverse osmosis (RO) is a membrane separation process in which feed water flows along the membrane surface under pressure. The filtered water permeates the separation membrane and is collected, while the concentrated water, containing the dissolved and undissolved material that does not flow through the membrane, is discharged to the drain. Reverse osmosis systems (RO Systems) remove salts, microorganisms and many high molecular weight organics.
Holding Tank
The permeate water then is held in a large holding tank where the disinfection process takes place. Corona Discharge ozonation is a strong oxidizer and can be particularly effective for water disinfection.
(What is ozone? See side bar) Ozone is injected into the water source, and due to its unique properties disinfects, prevents growth of micro-organisms, and can also help in rendering harmful chemicals and unwanted toxins harmless.
Ozone (O3) is one of the most powerful natural sanitizers and deodorizers known to science. Ozone (O3) has 3 oxygen atoms as compared to normal oxygen (O2) which only has 2 atoms. Ozone is created when oxygen (O2) molecules are split into two separate atoms by lightning and electrical arcs. The freed atoms recombine in 3-atom groups to form ozone (O3). Ozone is produced by a “Corona Discharge” (a high voltage electrical discharge like lightning in a thunderstorm) which actually converts Oxygen (O2) into Ozone (O3). This provides the most effective and environmentally sound deodorizing method available. Using no chemicals, our units simply manipulate .
Polishing Filter
The last stage of the purification process is the Polishing Filter. The disinfected water passes through the polishing filter to remove any remaining and unwanted VOCs, odours, and waterborne microorganisms to ensure it is fresh tasting, crystal clear water.
