Save water and money with the ClearWash PR Series
The cost of water is at an all time high. With many cities limiting water usage, it’s evident that a reclaim unit will not only save water for your car wash, but money and the environment as well. Discover the benefits of the industry leading ClearWash PR Series.
Before purchasing a reclaim system, make sure to confirm a few key factors that could impact the installation and operation of your system.
- Do you need to conform to code to get permission to build?
- Do you want to save money on water tax?
When researching types of water reclaim systems you will discover there are numerous types of equipment available. Depending on your desired end goal, you might choose a particular type of equipment over another.
If your main objective is to conform to code and get your construction permit in a timely manner you’ll want to limit your research to reuse dedicated equipment. This will ultimately cost less but it will give you a limited-service water return. In this case reclaim equipment is a cost not an investment.
On the other hand, if you are in a high water-tax area, your main objective is most likely to reduce a recurring expense: water allocated to each wash. To do so you’ll want to invest in durable equipment which will lower your wash cost repeatedly for years to come.
As you see, it’s important to do the long-term math prior to making any decision.
The Clearwash PR Series developed and hand-made by Clear Technologies in Cambridge, Ont., brings a new dimension to water saving. The equipment is available in two different flow configurations, 40 gallons a minute for Roll-over bays and 90 gallons a minute for Tunnel applications. Two PR-90 units can be coupled to accommodate larger tunnels.
The reclaim equipment can be hooked directly to the high-pressure station of the car wash to feed all high-pressure rinse cycles with reclaimed water. The system is triggered by pressure drop in the feed line when the car wash creates a demand for water and feeds highly filtered water to the pumps.
Depending on your locations, some road abrasive substance and plain dust collected by vehicles are smaller than 2 microns and will render your water blurry — even after thorough conventional filtration. The PR series of reclaim equipment uses a high-performance filtering media called NextSand® which offers a better filtration than most of the other units in the market.
In a reclaim environment this blurriness of the raw water will continuously increase as you circulate the reclaimed water through the closed loop reclaim process. These situations are unpredictable and can be addressed only once they are noticed on site. Very few reclaim equipment manufacturers have the capability to address these situations.
The PR series of equipment constantly monitors pressure, dirty water availability through tank level, filter restriction to trigger backwash, main pump status and more. In the event of a fault due a low water level at the dirty water tank or any other anomaly, the unit will automatically switch to city water feed, giving a continuous operation no matter the conditions.
An intelligent control module runs the equipment and is web accessible by our service team, allowing for remote troubleshooting that minimises down time and service call costs.
No matter your location, your level of reclamation or your wash count, the reclaim action will induce a concentration effect of all inputs to the freshwater, whether it is chemicals (soaps and other) road film, oil and grease or simple dust and sand particles. In some rural areas, you also must deal with animal excrements that carry a high load of bacteria and microbes.
Some of those contaminants are too small to be segregated by filters. Those contaminants will simply flow through and concentrate into your reclaimed water tank. It is especially important to understand, address or live with this phenomenon. That is true for all reclaim systems no matter the manufacturer.
Reclaim equipment types
Reclaim systems are separated in three main categories.
- Reuse water savers
- High pressure-reclaim units
- Total-reclaim equipment. (We will not address this category here)
Reuse water savers are essentially hydro-cyclonic separators that will give you a water filtration cut-off dictated by the specific gravity of the particles present in the wastewater. You might expect to get a 25-to-75-micron segregation. The more lightweight particles found in your water, the more troubled your reclaim water will be.
The reclaimed water generated by those systems is mostly used to rinse bay floors or clean trenches. It is not recommended for high pressure piston pumps, such as CATs.
Another factor to consider is that hydro-cyclonic filtration works well when performing at 80%+ of flow design capacity. As an example, a cyclonic separator designed for 40 GPM will not segregate particles if it is delivering 6 GPM (such as a chemical application cycle for instance). The lower limit of through flow to achieve separation will be 80% of 40 GPM or 32 GPM min. This means it’s not suitable for directly feeding your wash equipment.
The only real advantage of those low performance filtering apparatus’ is their low price compared to pressure reclaim equipment. If you’re strictly looking for a code approval and you don’t care about saving water, this would be an ideal option. Feed your in-bay maintenance hose with it and you will be satisfied with the performance. Our PR-40 and PR-90 reclaim units are designed for this application.
High pressure reclaim units are a different breed. Depending on the manufacturer and model chosen they can be fully automatic with alarm web reporting and self-cleaning filters, or totally manual with human filter cleaning and no issue alarm. Price will vary according to operational convenience and filtering performance.
We recommend a fully automated unit, as the difference in price will be offset by the additional water savings year-over-year.
Typically, those units give you a filtration quality between 3 to 10 microns, well suited for Piston High pressure pumps, they will also feed the wash station directly as the wash is performed. They feed the high-pressure cycles of the wash and do not produce water of a sufficient quality for chemical application or final rinse.
The best valued units on the market offer: self-cleaning filter, on-board odor control, full automation with filter cleaning and online monitoring and firmware updates. Optimal performance can be expected from reclaim units equipped with media bed filters that have auto backwash cycles.
When hooked up to high-pressure cycles only, they can typically save between 50% and 65% of your total water usage. The exact quantity saved is dictated by your wash cycle configuration and not by the reclaim equipment itself. As such, the reclaim equipment will reclaim 100% of the water it is required to supply, as it’s the fresh water low pressure volume that defines the reclaim percentage or efficiency.
The cost of water and pressure from cities to conserve has made it evident that a water reclaim system is not only beneficial but necessary for your business. The ClearWash PR Series uses cutting edge technology to deliver a superior water reclaim system, making it the obvious choice for your car wash!
For more information about the ClearWash Reclaim Series please contact us today:
1-833-622-1643 | [email protected] | https://cleartech-inc.com/