If you have well water or are drawing water from a lake or river and the water comes out of your tap discoloured or a tea colour, chances are you have tannins in your water! Tannins are caused by rotting vegetation, often cedar roots, tinting the water.
The following is the basic process a Tannin Filter goes through to remove Tannins from your water.
Tannin filters look and work very much like Water softeners. They have two tanks, one that is smaller diameter and is sealed with a control valve at the top, which is called the media tank. The other tank (that looks like a garbage can) has a lid that holds the salt, which is called the brine tank. Sometimes the smaller tank is actually inside the larger tank.
All of the water in the house runs through a bed of small beads just like in a water softener. The big difference in a Tannin Filter is that these beads are white. As the water passes through the tannin media the tannins are removed from your water by mechanical filtration, ion exchange and adsorption. The media holds the tannins until the tannin filter media is regenerated.
Eventually, the media is saturated with Tannins and needs to be regenerated so it can continue to remove tannins from your water. The Tannin Filter is on a timer set to regenerate every third night.
The Tannin Filter starts the regeneration process by automatically backwashing all of the media and then sucking the salty water from the brine tank. As the salty water or brine runs over the tannin media it regenerates the beads. During this process the tannins are flushed from the media and into the drain.
The final step in the regeneration process consists of the Tannin Filter putting the correct amount of water into the brine tank to make brine so it is ready when the next regeneration is needed.
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