Backwash Recycling USA

The topic was certainly a hot-button issue at last year’s Pool Industry Expo in Monterrey, CA. It’s also a reason why products like Backwash Recycling USA have suddenly become very relevant to the conversation about water conservation. The system promises to help homeowners save thousands of gallons of water while keeping their pool filters effortlessly clean and helping protect the environment.

“If you’re backwashing, the things that are in that backwash, besides salts and chlorine are metals. Typically it’s copper which is deadly to algae in a pool, of course, but when it enters our ecosystem, it creates a lot of problems,” said Tapley, “the discharge itself typically is just sediments of clay or sand, but it does have some stuff in it that’s not good for the environment.”

Many pool professionals have already begun getting fined according to Tapley. “Here where I live in the Central Valley, the city has actually hired water patrol police. We need real police, but the water patrol, they’re out. There are huge stiff fines for wasting water and dumping it into storm drains and improper disposal is costing pool service technicians a ton of money when they don’t do things the right way. At P.I.E. I ran into several service guys that told me that they had already been fined up to $1,000 for backwashing cartridges in the street,” said Tapley.

To put the numbers into the proper context, Tapley explained just how much water is used in backwashing filters each year. “A typical backwash for a sand filter is 200 to 250 gallons and it’s recommended to backwash them once a week,” explained Tapley, “that’s over 5,000 gallons a year of freshwater that you have to put back in the pool to replace it. Keep in mind that the skimmer starts grabbing air because the water level drops. So you got to double that. I mean, you’re really talking about 10,000 gallons per pool.”

“When you’re cleaning the filter and you dump a couple of hundred gallons of water out of the ground, you lose that pretreated water,” explained Tapley, “and when you’re putting the fresh water back in, then you got to go right back to your test kit and start readjusting the pool. The service guys realize that every time that they have to put more chlorine in because they just top the pool back up and give it a couple of hundred gallons of water. So that said, I feel like when we have pretreated water that we’re capturing and putting it right back in, that is a savings right there itself. If it is a saltwater pool, of course, then we’re saving the salt water.”

Read the original article here.