Chemical Automation: Ensuring Clean, Safe Water with Precision

Chemical Automation is the cornerstone of effective water treatment. It involves the automatic monitoring and control of sanitizer and pH levels, ensuring your water remains clean, safe, and balanced. This helps prevent issues like corrosion, scaling, and harmful bacteria growth (such as E. coli and Pseudomonas), ultimately safeguarding your facility from potential shutdowns by health authorities.

Why Chemical Automation is Essential

By continuously monitoring the water’s pH and sanitizer levels, Chemical Automation ensures that your water remains in top condition, day in and day out. It significantly reduces chemical usage, lowers maintenance costs, and minimizes the need for repairs.

It’s now considered a must-have for all commercial and public pools, spas, and high-quality residential installations, offering peace of mind and long-term cost savings

Sanitizer Control: Precise Chlorine Management for Safe Water

Sanitizer Control primarily uses the Amperometric chlorine sensor (ppm) to measure the chlorine concentration in the water. This direct measurement in parts per million (ppm) is the most critical factor for ensuring effective disinfection and maintaining safe water conditions.

Why PPM Control is Essential:

The Amperometric chlorine sensor gives an accurate, real-time measurement of chlorine levels in ppm, ensuring that the right amount of sanitizer is always present for optimal disinfection. This precise control helps maintain clean, safe water while minimizing chemical use and ensuring compliance with health standards.

ORP as a Backup for Consistent Sanitation:

While PPM control is the primary method for managing chlorine levels, ORP (Oxidation-Reduction Potential) serves as a valuable reference and backup. ORP measures the overall sanitizer activity in the water and provides a secondary check to confirm that the chlorine is effectively neutralizing harmful bacteria. This additional layer of monitoring helps ensure reliable sanitation under varying conditions.

With Sanitizer Control, you ensure optimal chlorine levels using PPM control while benefiting from the ORP reference as a backup to maintain safe, clean water.

Benefits of Using PPM Sensor for Accurate Sanitizer Control in Pools and Spas

The Sanitizer Control Menu is designed to provide accurate and reliable control of chlorine or bromine levels in your water. Using the PPM sensor as the primary source, it measures sanitizer concentration in parts per million (ppm) or milligrams per liter, ensuring precise and consistent chlorine dosing. The sensor’s readings can also be calibrated to account for the effect of cyanuric acid stabilization, allowing for accurate measurements even in pools or spas with high cyanuric acid levels.

In addition, ORP (Oxidation-Reduction Potential) serves as a backup reference for monitoring sanitizer effectiveness, ensuring comprehensive water quality control. The menu offers key features, including adjustable control modes (Off, Manual, Auto, Timer), sensor calibration (1-3 points for precise readings), customizable setpoints and alarms, shock treatment options (manual or scheduled), and chemical saver programs to optimize chemical use. The run time display tracks feed events and cumulative run time, providing full visibility of your system’s operation.

For added flexibility, Super-chlorination can be initiated manually or scheduled on a weekly or multi-weekly basis, ensuring that your pool or spa remains clean and safe at all times.

pH Control: Essential for Water Quality

pH is a measure of the acidity or alkalinity of water and is crucial for maintaining proper water chemistry. It’s based on the concentration of hydrogen ions (H+) in the water, which are very active and influence most chemical reactions in water.

The pH scale ranges from 0 to 14, with 7 being neutral. A pH of 7 means the water has a balanced concentration of hydrogen ions, while a pH above 7 (alkaline) or below 7 (acidic) indicates an imbalance. For example, a pH of 8 is 10 times less acidic than a pH of 7, and a pH of 6 is 10 times more acidic.

Why pH Matters

Small changes in pH can have significant impacts on water quality. For example, an increase of just one unit on the pH scale—from 7 to 8—means the water has become ten times less acidic. Therefore, close pH control is essential for keeping your pool or spa in optimal condition.

Ideal pH Range

For safe and comfortable water, the ideal pH range is 7.2 to 7.6.

• Below 7.2 (acidic): Water becomes too acidic, causing eye irritation and corrosion of equipment like pumps, filters, and surfaces.
• Above 7.6 (alkaline): Water becomes too alkaline, leading to eye irritation, cloudiness, scaling, and stains on surfaces.

pH Control Benefits

Maintaining the right pH balance helps keep your water comfortable for swimmers and protects your equipment from damage, reducing maintenance and repair costs. With precise pH control systems, you can ensure your pool or spa stays within the ideal range automatically, providing consistent, safe water for your enjoyment.

pH Menu: Automatic pH Control for Optimal Water Chemistry

The pH menu allows you to manage pH control parameters for your pool or spa, using acid, base, or a combination of both feeds to maintain the ideal pH balance. It also includes an Acid Wash program, which periodically injects an acid rinse solution to clean the sensor heads, ensuring consistent and accurate readings.

Why pH Control Matters

pH plays a crucial role in the effectiveness of Hypochlorous Acid (HOCl), the most active form of Free Chlorine, which is the primary sanitizer in your water. At a pH of 7.5, approximately 50% of Free Chlorine exists as HOCl, providing effective sanitization. However, as the pH increases, HOCl dissociates into a less active ionic form (OCl-), reducing its sanitizing efficiency.

How pH is Affected

Several factors can influence the pH of your water:

• Increase in pH: Adding alkaline chemicals such as liquid chlorine (Sodium Hypochlorite NaOCl), dry chlorine (Calcium Hypochlorite Ca[OCl]2), or make-up water can raise the pH.
• Decrease in pH: The addition of Chlorine Gas (Cl2), body perspiration, acid rain, or make-up water can lower the pH.

To manage pH levels, acids (like muriatic acid (HCl) or Sodium Bisulfate (NaHSO4)) are used to lower pH, while bases (like caustic soda (NaOH) or soda ash) are used to raise it.

Automated pH Control

In the past, pH adjustment chemicals were added manually or through chemical feeders. Now, automatic controllers make on-demand pH corrections, ensuring accurate and timely adjustments.

A chemical controller continuously monitors the pH with an electronic pH sensor, typically a glass pH electrode. The sensor reads in millivolts (mV), with neutral pH (7) at 0 mV, and around -60 mV at pH 8. For the recommended pH of 7.4, the reading is typically around -25 mV.

As pH readings can vary slightly between sensors, it’s important to regularly calibrate the sensor using a Phenol Red test kit or the built-in calibration feature of pH testers and controllers.

Key Benefits of pH Control

✔ Improved Sanitizer Effectiveness: Proper pH control ensures chlorine remains in its most effective form (HOCl) for sanitization.

✔ Automated Adjustments: Automatic controllers make timely pH corrections, reducing manual intervention and ensuring consistent water quality.

✔ Accurate Monitoring: Regular calibration ensures precise sensor readings for optimal water chemistry.

Principles of Water Treatment

Effective water treatment for swimming pools, spas, and industrial applications combines various physical and chemical processes, including pumping, filtration, chemical treatment, heating, and water replacement.

The primary goals of water treatment are:

• Maintaining Clean and Safe Water: Ensuring the water meets the bacteriological and physiological standards set by state and local health departments.
• Protecting Equipment: Preventing corrosion or scaling caused by the aggressiveness of the water and its chemical composition.

To achieve these objectives, the CHEMTROL® Programmable Controllers integrate all monitoring, control, and communication functions into a single system powered by a robust microprocessor. The Main Screen display provides an overview of the entire process, allowing operators to monitor all functions and quickly adjust to changing conditions.

The CHEMTROL® Programmable Controllers function like a computer, offering full-screen displays and easy access to all menus and submenus. The front panel keypad allows operators to navigate menus, enter and exit submenus, and modify key settings. This includes adjustments to sensor calibration, control setpoints, alarm thresholds, and programs for super-chlorination, sequential backwashing, chemical savings, and energy efficiency.

Implementation

Due to the variety of processing equipment from different manufacturers, each controlled individually, the installation and operation of an automated system can often be complex and inefficient.

Today, most countries require automatic processes for chemical feeding of sanitizers and pH control in all commercial, semi-public, and public aquatic facilities. At a minimum, this involves an automatic chemical feeder, such as a pump or erosion feeder, or a fixed-rate dispenser with or without a timing device.

CHEMTROL® controllers have played a key role in maintaining public safety, ensuring consistent disinfection under varying conditions and regulatory requirements. This is especially crucial when meeting mandatory public health obligations. With all control, monitoring, and communication functions centralized in one integrated command center, CHEMTROL® offers peace of mind, covering all your water treatment control and chemical automation needs.