[Steam-engine] Chlorine Water

[Blake]

I don't think the chlorine will hurt anything at all. Where I work 
(until the place closes in a week or so) we use 40,000 lbs of city 
water an hour in our boilers.

We had considered switching to straight Lake Erie water at a 
drastic cost savings since the rest of the plant runs straight 
lake water. But, they figured the cost of filtering the water 
would be too much to make it feasable.

All the water we use goes through softeners and then deaerators. 
We add a sulfite powder to the water in deaerator to scavenge 
oxygen, and we add a phosphate directly to the boilers to control 
corrosion and coat the steel inside. We also control conductivity 
of the boiler water through continuous surface blowdown. Try to 
keep the conductivity around 5000 uv.

I asked our Nalco representative about chlorine in city water and 
he said there wasn't much concern. Most likely it has less 
minerals other contaminants than well water anyway.

When I took my Rumely engine to shows - and you never knew what 
their water was like - I'd check the pH of the feed water and add 
soda ash (from a swimming pool place) to bring the pH up to about 
8. At least the water should not be so corrosive and soda ash is 
easily soluble (unlike lime deposits). I never checked the boiler 
water itself, but that is probably the best thing to do. If you 
have a surface blowdown, that would be the place to check it. It 
is hard to do though without some kind of little cooler that will 
cool the water coming out - otherwise it will just flash off. You 
can figure something out.

Take care,
Blake



On Thu Jan 19 06:42:56 PST 2006, Andy glines 
<pioneersop96 at yahoo.com> wrote:

I was discussing the use of city water in boilers with
another engineer the other day.  He complained about
our city water and the corrosion that the chlorine
caused.  I told him that allowing the water to sit on
a tank for a few days would allow the Chlorine to
"evaporate" out of the water and to do this if
possible.  Did I give good advise?  What else should
we do when steaming with city water?


Andy Glines
Evansville, IN

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