Water usage per reclaimed screen??

[Ron Pierson]

OK guys/gals, How much water does it take (on average) to completely reclaim and make ready for emulsion a 23X31 screen?
Trying to get a handle on usage so we can figure out conservation.

[Croft]

saw this video a while back, I would say its pretty accurate , we removed our under sink separator over christmas and I ended up spraying a couple out with a bucket under the sink my results were similar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Figrqk2EcH4

[Croft]

for a total I would say 5-6.5 gallons

[mooseman]

Simply run your pressure washer into a container for a fixed amount of time, say one minute then measure the volume.
Then time your normal reclaim on a screen or several screens and do the simple math.
Alternatively your pressure washer should have a rating,  gallons per minute or gallons per hour  it is basically a positive displacement pump so the rating should be pretty accurate.
mooseman

[Ron Pierson]

Well - we are going full auto.
Looks like the water usage is dramatically increased.
We have two processes, a pressure washer to get emulsion off and a de-haze with a simple garden hose rinse.
I'm going to do the "5 gallon" thing to see where we are at at the moment and report back.

[Prince Art]

It would seem that your overall reclaim procedure would have a big effect on water usage. There's a lot of variety in exactly how different shops reclaim (such as no tank, 1 tank, 2 tanks), and it seems reasonable to expect water usage to vary accordingly. Perhaps you could include what you're doing currently as a point of reference; it would help the data make more sense. (Just a thought.)

[DannyGruninger]

I dont have much info on the useage but we are pretty automated in reclaim now. We are in the process of using recycled water that is stored in a 2500 gallon tank. The auto reclaim machine will use water from the storage tank, the water is then filtered through 5 stages and brought back into the storage tank. We have water feeding the tank so when it gets to a certain level fresh water is pumped in to bring it back up. We should have the system fully operational here in a couple weeks if you want to come check it out(we re purposed some stuff out of our dye shop to make this work but it can be done super cheap). Knowing your screen throughput this would be a no brainer to recycle the water. We are only doing 150 screens a shift and I know its going to have a sizeable impact here. I believe your doing 800+ screens a day so your savings would be huge. I closed my dye shop due to the price of water, cleaning 1000 screens a day I'm sure is pricey when it comes to water.

[jsheridan]

The only way to know for sure in your shop is to go by a water meter and put it on the waterline. record your daily usage. After a few weeks you'll have a solid answer.

[Ron Pierson]

Hey Danny and all.....

Thanks for the response. I did use 5 gallon buckets to determine our usage per screen. This usage is only for the reclaim. We have a CCI machine that de-inks 4 at a time. The solution is water-base. We hose off any residue from that process with a splash of water and apply emulsion remover. Pressure washer is used to remove emulsion, about 1.5 minutes a screen. We, then, de-haze and rinse with a garden hose with a spray handle. The whole process uses 5-6 gallons a screen. We are going full auto and the water usage rates increase dramatically. In all fairness, we haven't installed it yet so we have no factual usage rates. I can re-post when we have our numbers. the cool thing about a water-base de-ink is the fact that we do not need to de-grease. 

We are looking to do what Danny has done and recycle our rinse water for re-use. We don't want the PH of the re-use to be high. Probably some pool chemical additive will keep this in check. The increased speed of the auto process seems to be worth the investment in all this. We will be able to get all our daily screens done in one shift rather than two.

Our intent is to keep our water usage in check.

[CBCB]

We had the water inspector come by. He made us do rinse an exposed screen, and a regular reclaim.

Nothing fancy in our process with reclaim. We use an ink remover, emulsion remover, and degreaser.

It worked out to just under 20L for a rinse and reclaim.

We've got a dip tank going in next week so I'm excited to see how much we can bring that usage down by.

We have Mooseman's DIY settling tank, too. Would love to add some filters and bring it all back through the system a couple times to save even more. Danny's setup sounds rad.


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