water testing

[John Barnes]

We have 14 AK200 machines running on site from individual ROunits fitted to their stands, each supplied by raw water from a sink tap feed, these machines are moved around the hospital to various departments to treat patients and are heavily used.
The questions I would like to ask are:
Are there any units out there that run simular set up?
what water testing is done?
and to what standard and frequency?

[Ian Wilde]

Hi John,

We have something a bit similar - Fresenius 5008 machines paired up with an Aqua Uno for doing wards that are not plumbed with RO water.

We have a bib tap taken from a sink cold water feed and then we have a drain stack for the waste of machine and RO.

We only test the water quality 6 monthly as we do with our community patients who use the same RO.  It's the same for disinfection frequency.  

We have retrofitted a filter housing to the RO case containing a carbon filter which we change monthly as it is a low quality filter.  

When not in use the RO is rinsing for 30 minutes every 4 hours on RO water from a media panel.  

As you may have seen from my other post the feed water here in the northwest is pretty good to start with which gives us the confidence to have the regime that we do.

[John Barnes]

What about Chlorine Ian, or do you assume that the filter will give you <0.1 for the duration its fitted if you change them monthly

[Ian Wilde]

Hi John,

We did some experiments a while back which showed that chlorine would still be removed down to <0.1 on a 3 times a week dialysis regime providing incoming water chlorine levels did not sky rocket.  We test the raw water chlorine monthly as part of our RO checks and it usually sits between 0.8 and 1.2ppm on a consistent basis within our hospital network.  

We use cheap carbon impregnated filters because we have lots lying around.  If we didn't then I'd stick a carbon block in there and lengthen the sampling to around 3 monthly probably - again this decision would have to be evidence based.

This is what just works for us on our raw water and on a thrice weekly regime.  Obviously you have your own levels of chlorine and regime of machine usage that may differ to us.

[fraser gilmour]

Hi John,
We have a similar setup currently with AK-200S's and RO's on the stand. The ward is fed with a softened supply and we dechlorinate at point of use with a 10" carbon block which is changed three monthly. We test the filters for performance pre and post change, and monitor incoming chlorine levels to the ward weekly. Our main units with central RO test incoming chlorine daily.
We have UFD kits on all the ward machines so don't strictly have to test TVC and EU, but we do anyway six monthly along with the mandatory solutes.

[Garry]

Hi,

Not exactly the same set up , but we do have several points where we have portable RO units (Purite Centurian 1500+ with UF filter) running off the tap water supply.  These are used mainly for out of hours acutes when the main plant is disinfecting or under service.  Have an average tap water total chlorine of 0.35ppm with a peak of 0.6ppm.  We fit two 20" carbon filters that are monitored daily and replaced every two months. Microbiology - monthly, aluminiums - quarterly, full analysis - 6 monthly.

We disinfect weekly and citric acid monthly as no softener used.