BRS pro series DI resin making my water WORSE?

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gobble

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I set up a 4 canister system in this order:

cation
anion
pro series mixed bed
regular mixed bed

I put TDS meters after the RO membrane, cation canister, anion canister, and final mixed bed canister. All resins are fresh. I just removed the cation last night and looked inside to find that bright purple color.

I'm getting the following TDS numbers:

After RO - 2
After cation - 8
After anion - 9
After mixed bed - 0

Based off TDS alone, the pro series separate bed resins are actually making my water WORSE. Does anyone have an explanation of what might be going on?
 

Blue Tang Clan

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How long are you waiting to see the TDS numbers? On my system, they always drop after the first minute
 
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gobble

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Last night I looked after about 3 hours. At the beginning (after running the RO alone for about 20 minutes), I was getting input water of 5 and higher cation and anion numbers. The numbers in my first post are where they settled.
 

chipmunkofdoom2

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You mentioned that you removed the resin and saw that it was still purple? Do you not have transparent DI canisters?
 
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gobble

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I have the clear BRS canisters. My point of looking inside was to see if I mistakenly loaded both with the same resin or put them backwards.
 

Randy Holmes-Farley

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Remember that TDS is not a measure of purity. It should be used to determine if things are "working".

The TDS after one single bed DI should rise. In your case, the cation is swapping H+ for all other cations, and H+ is more conductive than all other cations by far, so TDS rises. So the rise from 2 to 8 ppm TDS is expected.

After the subsequent anion bed, it should drop and hit zero (not 9 ppm TDS), unless it is depleted, or you accidentally put in a second cation bed.
 
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gobble

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Remember that TDS is not a measure of purity. It should be used to determine if things are "working".

The TDS after one single bed DI should rise. In your case, the cation is swapping H+ for all other cations, and H+ is more conductive than all other cations by far, so TDS rises. So the rise from 2 to 8 ppm TDS is expected.

After the subsequent anion bed, it should drop and hit zero (not 9 ppm TDS), unless it is depleted, or you accidentally put in a second cation bed.

Well you were sort of right, and I'm an idiot. What you said got me to look inside the anion canister. I put the cartridge in upside down! Oops.

Problem solved, thanks!
 

Zack@BRS

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@gobble Glad you got it sorted out. Randy is spot on. We actually don't take readings after the cation for this reason. Things should come down after the anion stage, and so long as you're getting 0 after the mixed bed, it sounds like you're in good shape. The great thing about the separate beds is that now you only need to swap out the bed that's depleting without throwing out unused resin!
 

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