Now let's meet Neil Sugarman from Conetego Systems.
We're talking water purification.
Hi, Neil.
Hi, Bob.
Can I interrupt you here for a minute?
Sure.
I think the first question I want to ask is, why do we need to bother with water purification if you're living in a, in a greater Metropolion area,
Well it's really going to help the quality of your home as far as protecting your investment and we can also treat the drinking water to improve its taste and..
Now how is it helping my investment?
I mean, isn't the water here pretty good?
Didn't you do a test on this?
Sure.
We took a look there is some hardness in the water, a few other small contaminants, no big reason to be concerned about.
And this pipe over here is
probably a great way to show what happens with hardness.
This wasn't here I presume.
No this was in another location taken out.
The scale here, which is hardness calcium.
Magnesium has been built up, and it really takes away from the opening of the pipe.
This is inch-and-a-half pipe.
Won't that also affect the performance of my appliances, my washing machine, dishwashers and so forth?
Yeah, absolutely.
This same type of effect is going to happen in your appliances and it's going to reduce the life of your water heater and dishwasher and other appliances.
Okay.
Well, the big question is, how does it all work?
You're saying we've got two different components, one for drinking water.
Right.
And one for water conditioning or softening.
Okay.
Which is this unit here.
Okay.
And this is all pretty revolutionary equipment.
And to find out exactly how it improves the quality of the water, I visited their facility right outside of Cleveland.
Watch.
Jim Kuley and his partner Bill Prior founded KineticCo back in 1970.
And one of the interesting things about the company is that your architectural plan is very user friendly.
Yeah , our concept here was to have an open area with windows and plants and very friendly for the employees to enjoy the environment and the things that are outside and to use the center of the buildingFor storage that sort of thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Everybody's got a view of nature out there, as well.
There's house plants hanging in there.
But it's hard to get an understanding of what you're making here, cause there's so many small stations making small components.
Well, Bob, why don't we head back to our research lab and we'll have some demos set up there.
We can try what our products do.
Yeah you know, Jim, all these new technologies that make the quality of life in our home so much better are tough to understand, so I'm glad you have got a good visual here.
Explain it.
Yes.
What we have is the demonstration that's similar with the one in your house but is done with clear tanks and is much smaller of course.
Sure, OK.
than the one in your house.
So will the street water be coming in one of these pipes?
They'll be coming in this pipe and your treated water would be leaving this pipe.
You could see that the turbine is turning here that's metering the water as it flows out of the house.
So this is the actual brains of the operation, right?
And I see you have a cross section here.
Right, and that shows the water meter there, and that would be simulating water usage.
So, there's no clocks, there's no electronic mechanism.
It's just a question of a simple little wheel.
Measuring the use of water.
Correct, that's totally not electric and it, it works just on the pressure and the flow of the water.
What you going to do with the screwdriver?
What I'm going to do now is I'm going to manually start a regeneration, this would happen automatically in your home by the flow of water.
Okay.
I'm going to do that manually, and we're going to draw a grind the solution up into the into the tank that's to be regenerated.
What we've done is we've colored this purple so you can see as it comes up through the tank itself.
Terrific.
Now you make all these different parts, right here, you don't buy the components.
We have injection molding equipment.
All the parts are injection molded, the large ones and smaller ones and we have done that right from the beginning of the company.
And the materials that are used are vinyls and plastics, you don't have to worry about any of this stuff contaminating the water?
That's correct, they're all glass reinforced plastic that's been certified by NSF to be totally non toxic.
Yeah.
And not a problem.
Wow, look at this.
So you've colored this water?
Right this would not be this way in your home.
This is the brine, right?
Yes that is brine, there's yeah.
It's going to be coming up through this tank here in a few minutes.
And the brine itself it's got regular salt added to it?
Right it's just like a table salt that you would use in the home, just sodium chloride.
That's what would normally be in this tank.
And so we're going to be seeing this coming through the medium in a minute.
Right.
That will be coming up through the median here in a second.
Oh boy.
Alright, so it's really forcing it up, right?
Right.
It's the brine coming through, forcing the hardness, the magnesium calcium, back off of the resin beads themselves.
And this, this is like the resin beads, this stuff?
Right, yeah, that yellow stuff.
Yeah, that's, that's iron exchange resin.
It's actually a styrene
plastic that's designed in a way - Right.
It's really kind of gushy, isn't it?
Yes, it feels really funny.
Yeah, but it just wipes right off.
It's not like its dirty.
So what is this doing?
It's attracting the -
It actually attracts the calcium and magnesium ions right to the bead and retains them and that's what softens the water.
But you don't have to change this stuff, right?
No.
No.
It cleanses.
And it gets recharged with the brine solution.
Now the tanks I have back at the house are huge things.
Do you make those here yourself?
Those huge ones we don't.
The smaller ones, such as this, we do make.
And they're made in two halves.
They're actually injection molded
And we join those into one part by spin welding together, spinning and creating the heat.
The heat melts the plastic and it becomes, essentially, one part.
Love it, this is the science lab.
Now, lets talk a little about the drinking water end of it.
Okay.
The reverse osmosis process straight around the corner here.
And soft water is really terrific in terms of your washing machine, your dishwashers, and how those appliances function and how clean the laundry comes out.
Right, that's correct.
But this is important in terms of what we're drinking and cooking with.
Right.
This is a reverse osmosis drinking water unit, just like the one that's in your basement, set up in the lab.
Yeah.
What we have is we're feeding another pink solution into this.
Pink solution is coming in through, what we call prefilter.
The prefilter has this inside of there, best designed to take out any particles that might remain in the water.
Any mineral particles?
No, the particulates, the bigger stuff.
Okay.
The water then comes from the prefilter into the reverse osmosis module here in the center.
Okay.
This is a cutaway of that with what it looks like.
But Jim, just what is osmosis?
Osmosis, actually, is a natural This normal process of taking water out of the ground and allowing plants and trees to take that water in.
That's what tree roots do, right?
That's correct.
And reverse osmosis reverses that process.
We push the water through the membrane, the water goes through, and it leaves the minerals behind.
So, but, this filter is, what's this stuff made out of?
Well this is actually a plastic.
It's a polyamid plastic.
It's a very very thin film and the water, again, gets pushed through that membrane and leaves a mineral and the
things behind, the contaminants behind.
Okay.
And then finally this black filter here?
Yes.
The third stage is a, is in here.
It's a very high density carbon filter that removes the organics from the water.
Things like chlorine, things that would taste
funny in the water, taste bad in the water.
Okay.
And then you've got some sort of tea test going on over here?
Yeah, well, this is the test we run where we've made tea.
We've made tea with both the Kinetico treated water and with bottled water that we've bought at the grocery
store.
And you can see the tea here is much lighter and it tastes better.
This tea combines the minerals with the tea and it tends to mask the flavor and mask the smell, so this water is much better for tea.
Better tea, better coffee, better juice.
Juices.
That everything.
Tell me one thing.
How much water do you actually get through the system.
I mean, do you have to just get a dribble like this?
Well, the system makes water very very slowly.
It, drip wise, but it enters accumulated into a pressure tank that you see here so that when you need water in the home, it mixes a much, it dispenses it at a much.
So, you've always got like five gallons on, on hand.
There's actually a little less than that, but there's plenty of water on storage and when you ask for it, it comes at a much faster rate.
At a faster rate.
This is the rate at which its actually making the water.
Right.
OK.
Thanks Jim.
Well thank you very much Bob.
So we're pretty much installed here and we're looking at our water service where the water comes in from the street and then what's happening here?
Sir, we're going up through what we call a bypass valve, so that you can shutoff the water to the softner in case you need to service it.
OK.
All right.
Then the copper pipes come straight over here and we're hooked up to here, right?
Right, the water from the, coming in from the house is, is going into the unit and through the mineral bed?
Yeah.
And then out and back into the house.
Into the rest of house.
Right.
What's the blue tank for?
Uh, well, that's part of our drinking water system over here.
This is a storage tank.
The reverse osmosis drinking water system is hooked up into or tapped into a cold water line, produces the high-purity drinking water, and that's stored here in this large storage tanks so you have water whenever you want.
So we can get that at the sink or also that will feed in the freezer, the ice maker right?
Right.
We're gonna hook it up to the ice maker, any bathrooms, whatever we need.
Terrific.
Thank you very much!
Sir.
We have to break for some messages.
Don't go away.
