Don't Get Hosed When It Comes to Water-fed Hoses

Posted by Shawn Gavin - RHG Products on Feb 3rd 2020

Don't Get Hosed When It Comes to Water-fed Hoses

Watch the original video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoQlmEdF8fo


Hey everybody, Sean Gavin RHG products. I want to take a couple of minutes and talk to you guys about hoses for your water-fed systems. Lately there's been a lot of discussion about not being able to get enough volume of water through a pole to run the rinse bars. Now rinse bars have become popular in the last year or so for people looking to rinse hydrophobic glass a lot faster or folks doing large commercial panes and wanting to be able to rinse those much quicker and as a result they've also been integrated into a lot of brushes that we produce and those brushes then end up in a residential guy's hands and they're looking for them to produce the water volume that they would want on their job sites as well. But there are some limiting factors and as we dig into the issues that people are having we're finding out that a lot of times they're very easy to rectify.


We just did a bucket test here at our facility. We have a three and a half gallon bucket. Our water flow here is pretty good, our gallons per minute, and our pressure at this building is actually really poor it's 30 PSI. So that actually allows us to test flow pretty well because of the fact that the pressure is so low. Rather than a building with really high pressure you get these false situations where you get a lot of pressure at the brush yet the volume is low. So we have the opposite here our volume is pretty good but our pressure is low.


So we hooked up 50 feet of our three eighths pure waterline to that water supply and we're able to fill a three and a half gallon bucket in two minutes so that's about a gallon and a half or so per minute of volume, again 30 PSI. When we hooked up the same distance of pole hose tubing to that same water supply, 50 feet, this is a three sixteenths ID rather than a three eighths it took around nine minutes to fill that same bucket. So that's around a third of a gallon a minute so same water supply, same pressure, very poor volume.


When we see people connecting long runs of pole tubing to the output of their RODI systems it's a little bit concerning because you're not going to get the volume of water out of that system that you need to produce the water at the brush 30, 40, 50 feet up from where you're working because obviously at that point now you're fighting gravity as well. So, what will help a lot of the folks that are having flow issues is if you run a three eighths line from your water system to your pole hose. Now what that does is it obviously delivers a lot more volume from your water system to your pole. When it hits your pole hose it's a bit like sticking the thumb over the end of the garden hose and it increases the pressure at the pole hose from the three eighths line to the three sixteenths ID line and creates more pressure at the brush.


Now the rinse bars themselves do not require very much volume or pressure to operate. We just tested here out of the 50 feet of hose a rinse bar. So running at about a third of a gallon a minute and 30 PSI we were able to run this and the flow of the water coming off the rinse bar was about 18 inches to 24 inches. So way more water than you would actually need in terms of volume yet a lot of people are having problems after RODI systems creating that. One thing we've also noticed is on the inlet side of RODI systems a lot of people are using this type of hose. Now this is easier to get around a job site but what happens is you have a lot less volume that can go through this than a three quarters or a five eighths inch garden hose line.


So the correct way to set up an RODI system on the job site is a length of garden hose coming from the water supply into the RODI pure water system. Then from there you want a three eighths line on the output and then you want as minimal amount of pole tubing as humanly possible because this is where all of your volume is lost. So if you have 300 feet of pole tubing on a job site coming right out of your RODI system you can expect that you're going to have low flow. If you have a long run of three eighths and a short run of pole tubing which is three sixteenths ID you're going to have much better performance at the brush which is where we want the water. Better flow with the brush means faster cleaning times which is the idea behind the rinse bar. So if you have the correct setup on the job site you're going to be much better off.


Now there are job sites where even if you do the correct hoses and the correct links and all these types of things what's going to happen is the water supply pressure is very poor. So that's when you're going to have to look into getting a boost pump and there's a lot of boost pumps on the market. There's inexpensive boost pumps for irrigation sprinkler systems that you can buy right off the shelf at places like Lowe's and those will boost your pressure 40 PSI or so coming into your RO system and then increase that pressure and volume coming out and help with that as well. But most of these issues that we're seeing are folks that are running inadequate volume out of their water system and trying to get long runs to their poles.


Now, if you're running DI only it really doesn't matter nearly as much if you're only trying to want to run one operator because you've got a lot more volume than an RODI system. So you're able to put a lot more volume through a three sixteenths creating a lot more pressure than the guy next door running an RODI system which operates at a lot lower water volume pressure. So, thought I'd point these ideas out in terms of hoses and hopefully this tip helps you on the next job site you're at where you have an issue with water pressure. Thank you very much.

Watch the original video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoQlmEdF8fo