Water Quality Improvement Professional
Greg’s opinions – these are mine alone, and do not reflect the opinion of anyone else unless explicitly stated otherwise
The most common driver of accelerated anode consumption is elevated electrical conductivity in the water, not the mere presence of sodium ions (or the absence of Calcium).
I have been solving corrosion problems for three decades, from residential systems in Utah to mission-critical industrial and institutional systems on multiple continents.
The corrosion-mechanism is not mysterious once you understand what is happening at the electrode interface inside your water heater.
Ion exchange trades calcium and magnesium for sodium (or potassium) on an equivalent basis. The resin does not know or care whether the water started at 5 or 55 grains per gallon. It swaps one equivalent of hardness for one equivalent of sodium each time. The average is about 7.5 milligrams per liter of sodium added for every grain per gallon of hardness removed.
A village newsletter landed on my desk recently, and the headline was bold enough to make anyone reach for their softener bypass valve: “YOU MUST(more…)
The microplastics story is a particularly clean illustration of something I think about constantly: the act of measurement changes what you’re measuring. Every time a sample is collected, handled, transferred, stored, processed, and analyzed, there are opportunities to introduce error. Some of those errors elevate contaminant counts. Some suppress them. Protocol compliance reduces the risk, it does not eliminate it.
The problem is that policy built on rhetorical shortcuts tends to produce blunt instruments. And when the instruments are blunt and the underlying science is nuanced, the compliance burden falls indiscriminately while actual risk reduction is uneven. That is where we are with PFAS regulation right now, and the water treatment industry, which sits at the intersection of PFAS as a contamination problem and PFAS as a chemistry used in treatment equipment, has more at stake in getting this right than almost any other sector.
TFAs are here forever. Short term risks seem minimal. The long-term picture is murkier and more concerning. TFA’s extreme persistence (no natural degradation in terminal sinks like oceans or deep aquifers) means accumulation is effectively irreversible. Sticking with TFA-forming refrigerants locks in decades of accumulation for short-term gains in global warming potential (GWP).