# Electrocoagulation tool



## dwsmith43 (Jan 26, 2014)

My city water has a crazy amount of silica. This is causing a never ending problem with diatoms. Does anyone know of a place to purchase or how to build a Electrocoagulation gadget to remove silica. Ro membranes only last about four water changes before they rip through.want to pretreat water in a large container (brute trash can) a couple days before water change.


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## Chester B (Dec 28, 2012)

How much is crazy? Do you know the source of the water for your City? Neches, Brazos, Trinity, other? Most water treatment plants employ some sort of coagulation in the process whether it be in front of Ultrafiltration membranes (not too many in Texas yet) or to inlet of a clarifier (very common) so i'm not sure how much more effective you'd be at removing any additional silica. Normally you would use RO membranes with an anti-scalant to get rid of silica and prevent fouling. I have a difficult time believing that silica would damage RO membranes so quickly rather than simply scale and foul them. Have you attempted to clean them with an RO cleaning solution to see if you can recover them? You'd want to perform the clean with a citric acid based cleaner to remove to target the inorganics.


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## rennsport2011 (Oct 21, 2013)

Chester Bo knows Water Treatment.


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## dwsmith43 (Jan 26, 2014)

City water report online. The ones hard to deal with seem to be phosphates 4.7 and silica 80-94. I can get my phosphates down too .5 using purigen, phosguard and chemi-pure. Dont know how to test tank water for silica.


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