Tucker Water-fed Technology

Jan 27th 2020

Tucker Water-fed Technology

WATCH ORIGINAL VIDEO HERE

Hey, what's up everybody? Sean Gavin, Tucker Pole Systems, RHG Products. Going to do a video about something that I've been doing a lot of research on lately, and that is filtration. So here at RHG, we've obviously been making water systems for 10 plus years. And there's a lot of choices on the market for water systems, but I believe a lot of the things we do here set us apart. And a big part of that is the RO membrane technology. So the way RO membranes work is under pressure. And basically, you can have a 40 inch RO membrane in any system from any manufacturer. And basically, if you put in 40 PSI of tap water pressure from the water supply, you will get a certain amount of water out. And for years and years, the amount you got out was exactly the same, because the membranes were always the same.

But it's a little bit different going into 2019. There's some new technology from the membrane standpoint, and we have it and it's very cool. At 40 PSI, our systems are going to make you exponentially more water than our competitors. So you may hook up to a water supply with our unit, get a gallon per minute, and hook up the competitors to that same unit, and get three quarters of a gallon, you may only get half a gallon, and the membrane will be the same size. So the technology has changed. How people package things will always be. You can only buy a 40 inch membrane and make it look so many ways, whether it's stainless, or PVC, or whatever the housing may be. So let's take a look at some membrane technology that we have flow through our hands. Again, we make a lot of water systems in the window cleaning industry, but we're not just in the window cleaning industry when it comes to water systems.


We do a lot of work for other manufacturers in the water purification industry that we really don't get into. And so those relationships lead us to technology that we can introduce to you guys for window cleaning, solar panel cleaning, house wash, rinsing with RO water, in your fleets, all these types of things. So this is a custom membrane here that we encapsulate for the hydroponic industry. So we have technology that allows us to take this membrane from a membrane manufacturer, encapsulate it, and we sell it to companies that then resell that encapsulated membrane into the hydroponic industry. Here is a incredibly low pressure, 21 inch membrane. This membrane will make more water than just about every other 21 inch membrane on the market today. We're the only ones with this. It's due to relationships like I just discussed.

Here's another custom membrane. This is a 30 inch membrane, so this is a custom size. If you Google membranes, you'll find 4021, 4040, that's the size. So the first 40 represents four inches. This is a four inch nominal width, so they call that a 40. And then the next is the length, so 4040. Neither of those are really actually the length, it's just somewhere close to that, and that's what happens in the water purification industry. But this is a 4030 made exclusively for us, private labeled for us. And this technology is, again, lowest operating pressure membranes in the world. So if you had a 4030 made by the next company, same size, drop it in the same housing, 40 PSI, this will make a ton more water than there's. The new Tucker 4060, the cart that we've been really kind of pushing, uses two of these.


So you hook up to 40, 50, 60 PSI, you're going to get one plus gallon per minute tap water. No more pumps. No more needing to boost pressure. It's all gone with the 4060. So the 4060 at 100 PSI, for instance, let's say you want to put a pump on it, you're going to make two and a half gallons per minute. That's unheard of, right? So the membrane technology that we have is different from anyone else in the market today. So systems may look alike, but where it ends is when you hook up the water and then you hook up the pole. All the money is made with the brush on the glass and the volume of water at the brush. So, that's a bit about the membrane technology. Now the next thing that you're going to see us start pushing a lot in 2019 is pre-filters for these membranes.


This is a standard carbon filter. It's called a 2.5x10 inch carbon filter. You see these on a lot of systems. They come in a white housing, you unscrew that housing, it drops down, this pops in, you screw it back together. This filter is very common. We use this on the three-stage Tucker carts. The way this filter works is, water enters the housing, goes down the center of this filter, gets pushed through the wall of the filter out. So you've pushed it through carbon block. This is made out of carbon. You can't really tell on this video, but this is like a long doughnut. So the water enters, get pushed through the carbon, and that's how it filters. This is rated at 5,000 gallons, this little filter. So what its job is, is to remove the chlorine in the water.


So the chlorine in the water needs to be removed so that we don't ruin all the fancy new technology we have. Because chlorine will destroy the element within the RO membrane. Now this is a 2.5x5, rated at 5,000 gallons. You can see it's hollow. There's not a whole lot of carbon here. What makes us different from everyone else yet again, is our ability to produce filtration in house. As long as we have some sort of spec to go on, we can build it. We make our own membrane housings. That's why we don't use stainless housings, because those are Chinese. People bring them in to use them. Great for them because they're cheap. But we make our housings in house to perform to our spec.


So again, RHGproducts.com, this is not sourced somewhere and then, "Hey it's ours." This is ours. We bring this stuff in for us. This is a 4x30 inch. So like that membrane I was talking about before, this is a 4030 carbon. So when we make these carbon filters, from end to end is solid carbon. 30 inches long, solid carbon. So imagine how many of these ground up could fit into this long empty tube. This filter's rated at somewhere around 100,000 gallons, and this is rated for 5,000. So, at RHG, what we always push for is the ability to do less frequent filter changes. So you drop this filter in, our advice is every six months, you pull this out and replace it. Now, what's happening in the water industry around the country is municipalities are switching from chlorine to treat the water to chloramines. And this is the important part of this video.


Chlorine is captured by these standard carbon filters. It's captured by our standard carbon filters. What we are beginning to do right now is basically, every system that ships from RHG Tucker will no longer have these standard carbon filters. They will have carbon filters designed to capture not only chlorine, but chloramines. And so if you don't use a filter like that, what happens is, you're trying to capture chlorine, there's none in the water, and chloramines are in the water. Chloramine will destroy the membrane just like chlorine. And you don't know whether your municipality is using chlorine or chloramines. The other difficult thing is that certain parts of the year, they'll treat with chlorine, and other times of the year, they'll treat with chloramines. And basically, you have no idea what they're up to. So we're switching, every system will ship out with a new filter that is designed to capture chloramine, as well as chlorine.


These are at a much higher expense for us than a standard carbon block, but it's what needs to go out in the system. Because what can happen is, if your system ships to a location where they're using chloramines in the water, and you have a standard carbon block filter, or even our regular carbon ABS shell filter, what will happen is the chloramines will pass by and destroy the RO membrane prematurely. If the RO is the engine of the vehicle, these are the oil changes. Beginning now, all of the filters going out in our systems will be designed to capture chloramine, as well as chlorine. You'll notice the price point of these replacement filters is much higher, so you'll probably see us offer both for those people that are sure they don't have chloramines in the water, or don't want to pony up for the extra filter.

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But the technology is very expensive compared to standard carbon, because there's an extra step in the manufacturing process of the carbon itself that enables it to then grab the chloramines, not just the chlorine in the water. The benefit is, that same filter is rated to treat many times the amount of gallons of water as the standard carbon. So it's not as if you're going to buy this filter and it's still only rated for 5,000. It will be rated at a higher amount of gallons. And so it's really important to understand that, although a lot of these systems look alike, what's in them is what matters. We can build a car that looks like the next car, and you get in it, and the engine has a turbo rather than not a turbo, and the performance is totally different. So we have to start thinking about that differently.


So what you want from pre-filtration, is you want something that's going to grab the chloramines in the water. And from an RO standpoint, you want something that is going to operate at the lowest operating pressure available today. And both of those things, right now, are only available from RHG and Tucker. So very cool stuff coming for 2019. We're just trying to add value. There'll be no increase in the cost of the systems to do such a thing, we're going to absorb it on the pre-filtration end. And then when you go to replace your filters, hopefully you'll think about us when it comes to dropping a new RO in a system you already own or needing a new carbon pre-filter for a system you own.


If you want to contact your municipality and say, "Hey, listen. Do you treat the water in the area with chloramines. Yes or no?" If they say no, cool. Cheap carbon for you, this is a $12 filter when it's just a carbon filter. The chloramine filter will be a whole lot more. Our cost is well above what we're selling this filter for today. So the cost of those filters is quite a bit higher, but if they're using the chloramines in your area, and you have a standard carbon filter, your RO is susceptible to damage and you have issues there.

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WATCH ORIGINAL VIDEO HERE