Urgent Help for Water Softener

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We use tandem water softeners. Due to unforeseen conditions, sodium hydroxide (caustic soda) water had transferred softener. During 5 hours the cationic resins are washed with sodium hydroxide mixture. Then resins block all the water flow in service operation. I am trying to find a method for cleaning and destroying stickiness situation. We have no time for resin discharge and load new cationic resins. How can we amend this terrible issue?

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6 Answers

  1. Dear Friend, 

    You didn't inform the NaOH concentration, my experiences for removing organic fouling in cationic resin Na-cycle. Every 3 month I was mixed NaOH with 1% only from NaCl weight per cycle regeneration. 

    For solving your you could neutralized your resin with HCl combine with oxalic Acid, 2:1, calculate with stoichiometric to the amount NaOH had used.

  2. Thank you all.

    I produced solution. There is no any flow (flux) through the tank, completely blocked. I used hydroxide peroxide and citric acid to decrease pH from 9,2 to 3. I applied a technique for recirculating water. Before applying backwash+regeneration, We done a pipeline modification for giving compressed industrial air for open nozzle. Finally we applied 3 times heavy duty bachwash. The service flowrate reached the design value and completely unblocked situation is running.. This application took 7 hours .  Thank you colleagues.

    1 Comment

    1. Next time use hot water if possible to rinse. It works much faster on caustic.

  5. Oh wow, the caustic soda has chemically melted the resin into a single block of glued plastic. There is no getting around it, that’s a tank and resin replacement, sorry.