We have had an email from a potential customer. It contained the following from a sewage treatment specialist who has had 30 years experience.

Commercial Water Softeners: Two problems for sewage plants:

1)They reduce alkalinity by removing the calcium (Ca2+) and magnesium (Mg2+) ions of water.

2)The create a brine like regenerate when the back-wash

Wastewater treatment requires alkalinity (as CaC03) and a PH of at least 6.8

Ammonium (NH4-N) is a major pollutant in wastewater. Without sufficient alkalinity, a sewage treatment plant will not nitrify and thus will not remove ammonium from the wastewater.

Aerobic wastewater operations are net-acid producing.  Alkalinity in the water is vital to buffer any pH changes.  The pH inside a sewage treatment plant should be between 7-9, with 8.5 being the optimal for nitrification (at 20°C) and 7-7.4 being the optimal overall.

Cleaning The Ion Exchanger

To clean the ion exchanger in a water softener, sodium and potassium salts (NaCl and KCl) are used to backwash the system.  The backwash water has a very high salt content that will kill the bacteria in a sewage treatment plant and prevent it from working if the backwash water enters the foul drains.

If a water softener is installed, or the incoming water does not have sufficient alkalinity (hardness), alkalinity will need to be dosed into the sewage treatment plant to ensure it functions correctly.”

A Conditioner is Different

They wanted to know if they would get the same problem if they used Aquabion as an alternative to a water softener. The answer is no because we are not removing the calcium or magnesium from the water nor are we replacing these ions with sodium. There is no backwash system using the salt-laden water so your private sewage treatment plant is safe. If you don’t have your own system you might still want to know that the salt doesn’t get removed from the sewage and therefore will be discharged typically into your local river.