Portable water deionizer

[Azure]

I bought a Griots Garage portable water deionizer a couple months back and after I figured out how I wanted to configure the piping in with my pressure washer, its been working okay. One question I have which would apply to any non-cartridge type water deionazation setup. Do any of you ever get any of the resin come out of your pressure washer? There are times when you can feel them shooting out with your hand. You can also feel them in a bucket when this happens. Is this normal for this type of water deionizer? I've confirmed that I have the water plumbed in and out of it correctly, so I thought I'd ask if anyone else has experienced this. I've had to stop and detach my pressure washer to clean out the water inlet before as it was plugged up. This a pain as you might guess.

[Coach Steve]

You shouldn't be getting any resin coming out of your tank. Check that the water pressure coming out of your deionizer meets the minimum required by your pw. If it's not high enough to meet the demand of your pw, it will essentially be pulling the water through your deionizer and possibly be sucking resin along with the water. If the pressure out if your deionizer is indeed high enough then I have no clue why resin is being allowed to leave the tank. You might want to call Griot's and ask them. Their customer service is too notch.
Be sure to follow up when you get it figured out.

Edit: Forgot to mention, it the PW demand isn't being met, it will burn out your pump very quickly due to cavitation.

[Azure]

You shouldn't be getting any resin coming out of your tank. Check that the water pressure coming out of your deionizer meets the minimum required by your pw. If it's not high enough to meet the demand of your pw, it will essentially be pulling the water through your deionizer and possibly be sucking resin along with the water. If the pressure out if your deionizer is indeed high enough then I have no clue why resin is being allowed to leave the tank. You might want to call Griot's and ask them. Their customer service is too notch.
Be sure to follow up when you get it figured out.

Edit: Forgot to mention, it the PW demand isn't being met, it will burn out your pump very quickly due to cavitation.

Thanks for the info. Would connecting the in and out of the deionizer tank backwards the first time cause this to happen? I did connect it backwards the first time LOL. Everything seemed fine at the time, but the water coming out of my pressure washer was minimally getting deionized (like ~450ppm without to ~300ppm with). When I got the system connected correctly, I was getting down to ~20ppm. I think I'm up to ~70ppm now after 10+ washes.

[Coach Steve]

Thanks for the info. Would connecting the in and out of the deionizer tank backwards the first time cause this to happen? I did connect it backwards the first time LOL. Everything seemed fine at the time, but the water coming out of my pressure washer was minimally getting deionized (like ~450ppm without to ~300ppm with). When I got the system connected correctly, I was getting down to ~20ppm. I think I'm up to ~70ppm now after 10+ washes.

I misspoke when I said the output pressure needs to meet the min require by your pw, I meant Gallons Per Minute (GPM). I'll answer your question first and come back to that.

Connecting it backwards may have been the cause of resin coming out.
As far as the TDS level being at 70ppm after 10 washes, that's certainty possible.
The higher the TDS present in the supply water, the less treated water the system will yield. At 450ppm, the resin is going to become depleted quickly thereby only producing 1/10 the amount of treated water it would if the source water was only 45ppm. As the resins become saturated, the amount of TDS present in the filtered water will creep up until eventually the input and output will be the same.

The manual for that system estimates the amount of treated water you can expect to yield with the source water containing 400ppm is approx 150 gals. That's not very much and when you consider the cost of the resin, your average cost per gallon is crazy expensive.

Here are a couple of things you can do to get the most out of the water the system will produce.
Only use the DI water for the final rinse.
There's no benefit to using it to wash and wet the car down. As long as the vehicle is kept wet, you won't get water spots from the city water. This will save you a ton of DI water.
Never rinse a vehicle using DI water without your pressure washer. You will use 3 to 4 times more water without a pw.
Buy a water meter and install it on the output side of your system. Home Depot sells one for about $10 that displays the gallons for that session as well as the total gallons since it was last reset. This will help you to be more frugal.

When you consider the cost associated with these types of systems when you have hard water, they aren't very coat effective. The water here in the PHX area varies wildly between 600-1050 ppm TDS. A home DI system cost me approx $5 per vehicle just to rinse! I sold the system and took advantage of the availability of a company here that provides DI solutions. Depending on the need of the customer,, they provide numerous sized tanks from small 10" diameter that will treat around 500 gals. all the way up to huge ones the size of a small buildings that provide hundreds of thousands of gallons before needing to be replenished. The company comes out and replaces the spent tank with a fresh one whenever I request one. The tank I use is 14" dia. and 5' tall and yields approx 1150 gals.
I pay $75 per tank and $15 for delivery/exchange. Way, way more cost effective!

Check to see if you have such a company in your area. If you're in socal, you do. They're called Purtec Water.

Back to your pw..
The system you have outputs approx 4.1gpm. Make sure this meets the min input of your pw.

[Azure]

I misspoke when I said the output pressure needs to meet the min require by your pw, I meant Gallons Per Minute (GPM). I'll answer your question first and come back to that.

Connecting it backwards may have been the cause of resin coming out.
As far as the TDS level being at 70ppm after 10 washes, that's certainty possible.
The higher the TDS present in the supply water, the less treated water the system will yield. At 450ppm, the resin is going to become depleted quickly thereby only producing 1/10 the amount of treated water it would if the source water was only 45ppm. As the resins become saturated, the amount of TDS present in the filtered water will creep up until eventually the input and output will be the same.

The manual for that system estimates the amount of treated water you can expect to yield with the source water containing 400ppm is approx 150 gals. That's not very much and when you consider the cost of the resin, your average cost per gallon is crazy expensive.

Here are a couple of things you can do to get the most out of the water the system will produce.
Only use the DI water for the final rinse.
There's no benefit to using it to wash and wet the car down. As long as the vehicle is kept wet, you won't get water spots from the city water. This will save you a ton of DI water.
Never rinse a vehicle using DI water without your pressure washer. You will use 3 to 4 times more water without a pw.
Buy a water meter and install it on the output side of your system. Home Depot sells one for about $10 that displays the gallons for that session as well as the total gallons since it was last reset. This will help you to be more frugal.

When you consider the cost associated with these types of systems when you have hard water, they aren't very coat effective. The water here in the PHX area varies wildly between 600-1050 ppm TDS. A home DI system cost me approx $5 per vehicle just to rinse! I sold the system and took advantage of the availability of a company here that provides DI solutions. Depending on the need of the customer,, they provide numerous sized tanks from small 10" diameter that will treat around 500 gals. all the way up to huge ones the size of a small buildings that provide hundreds of thousands of gallons before needing to be replenished. The company comes out and replaces the spent tank with a fresh one whenever I request one. The tank I use is 14" dia. and 5' tall and yields approx 1150 gals.
I pay $75 per tank and $15 for delivery/exchange. Way, way more cost effective!

Check to see if you have such a company in your area. If you're in socal, you do. They're called Purtec Water.

Back to your pw..
The system you have outputs approx 4.1gpm. Make sure this meets the min input of your pw.

Thanks! Very helpful. I actually do have something to supplement rinsing to manage water spots. I buy two - 5 gallon water jugs of DI water from Aqua Systems. They are in water jugs like the ones you see used for drinking water systems you see in offices etc. They are just $6 and some change each. I can return the jugs and get more when I need it. I currently use a Worx hydroshot to dispense the DI water to "spot free rinse", but the plan was to adapt a small pump to feed it into my PW when I need it. The hydroshot does not have much of any pressure output and a pain to get out along with my pressure water setup. That's a future project. I have yet to buy replacement resin, so I'll be looking into your setup. Thanks for that info! I'll see what kind of water supply specs my pressure washer requires. My house water pressure is pretty high, but I don't know what the reading is. My plumber mentioned it about the area I live in back when we had a water heater installed.

[Azure]

Thought I'd follow-up with this thread since I refilled my water deionizer this spring. Turns out connecting my water deionizer backwards the first time did cause the media to come out during use. Apparently it trapped some of the media in the UP tube. At the end of fall season, I completely emptied my deionizer tank and rinsed the tank and fittings for storage. When I refilled my tank, I made sure to reconnect everything correctly and all has been well with it so far this season. After 5 uses (rinses), my TDS still measures 0 PPM. That is already better than I was getting last season. The media that originally came inside my tank must have not been as pure as Griots replacement media. Anyway, hope that helps some folks.