If you enjoy listening to curse words, find the closest water plant near you that uses a dry lime silo or bag lime, and ask them how much they love it. They don't. Very rarely have I ever met anyone who just loves feeding dry lime. They absolutely hate it.
Water Utilities like Lime (either Calcium Oxide or Calcium Hydroxide) for the fact that it is cheap, and for what it can potentially do with the water by adding pH, alkalinity, and hardness. This is important for various functions within the treatment process, as well as stabilizing the water as it enters the water distribution lines.
What they hate about it is how tough it is to feed consistently, how it's constantly clogging, and the high O&M cost associated with the day-to-day operations continually cleaning those feed lines, clear wells, as well as the constant malfunctions on the feed equipment. It is the operators nightmare. This is also something that has been severely overlooked by many design firms that put in equipment. The engineers are not the ones working on the pumps when they break down!
This is 2016 though, right? Isn't there someone who has figured how to make this work? Yes!
Burnett Lime figured out how to make liquid lime, patenting the CAL~FLO System in 1992, and we still have our first systems running with the same pump, tank, and mixer, 24 years later. We manufacture the equipment, and we manufacture the slurry. We guarantee it to work! After 250 installations throughout the US, we are now the standard for any liquid lime feed system. It works, and if it doesn't, we fix it fast.
So is it really possible? Can you feed a lime product and have a system that is guaranteed to work? Yes, of course it is with the CAL~FLO Systems and Slurry, but we have had to challenge several false assumptions that people held (and still hold today) about the nature of lime.
One of the first big misconceptions about lime is, "Will it plug/clog/scale in the system?" In a lime silo, most likely it will. If you have another liquid lime system that is just a tank and a pump, for sure you will have feed problems. The CAL~FLO system has a modified tank, where you will not have any sediment or clogging in the tank.
Another misconception is with pump placement. When we see a design with a pump farm separated from the tanks, we know it will be an epic fail. The utility will eventually call us to bring in our test unit while they clean up their mess. Afterwards, many times they just switch to CAL~FLO all the way.
Another major misconception is the movement of slurry in the feed line. Previous technology believes that lime needs to move 6ft./second to not settle. CAL~FLO only moves inches....but it pulses 150 times/sec. We can push our CAL~FLO over 1200 feet with no clogs! Can your lime do that?
What do you think? Learn more about our CAL~FLO System and RE~MIN Process. We also have a great free webinar for you to view about our technologies. As always, I would love to hear your feedback!