Steve Guercia, Commercial Water Treatment Manager

Having silver is usually a good thing. When there’s silver in your water, well, that’s not so good. We recently received a call from a customer with an unusual problem; they had silver in their water.

This company manufactures windows. They found that the dirty water from washing the glass had silver in it and it was too high to send down the drain. They knew the silver was coming from the coating on the glass. They asked us to figure out how to remove the silver from the wash water so it wouldn’t contaminate.

So we set up bench testing – a process where we mimic treatment on a “bench” to see which treatments work and which don’t. We found that a combination of filter cartridges and a material that removes negatively charged particles would remove over 90% of the silver. However, that material would be destroyed by the chlorine and soap in the water, so we had to add additional treatment.

Then we had to come up with a way to actually get the water to go through the treatment. The glass washer just dumped the water down a drain in the floor. We needed a way to collect that water as quickly as possible to minimize down time on the machine while it drained and then treat it slowly. We devised a way to quickly pump the water into a tank and then slowly pump the water through treatment.

Once that hurdle was overcome, we needed a way to turn the pumps on and off, a way to alert the staff if the tank was too full, a way to protect the pumps if the tank was empty, a way to … well, you get the idea.

Treatment is a process. It’s not just a piece of equipment that the water goes through. It’s a highly variable and changing set of components that must interact together in a specific way and order. If everything isn’t properly matched and balanced, the whole system will fail.

Secondwind has the experience and the knowledge to match treatment system with pumps and storage and tie it all together with controls that run everything. We custom design systems to be reliable when challenged with a limited budget. We can design systems to be fully automated and automatically alert you to a problem. The choice is yours.

There’s no cost for us to come to your facility to review your needs and determine if we can help you. If we can solve your problem, we’ll provide a written proposal. If we can’t solve your problem, we’ll tell you that. We don’t take on jobs we can’t be absolutely certain we’ll be successful with.

And the people making windows? The silver in their waste water is way below the level set by the city. We have now installed this system in two of their New England facilities.