R.O. Machine dead

came in this morning, and the r.o. machine is dead...culligan man came out (at time and a half) to tell me its either a soleniod that is tripping out the machine (can get by TUESDAY) or the circuit board (couple of weeks to get) machine is a year old, our other wash the r.o. machine has been the most reliable piece of equip. known. So the question is WHAT THE HECK DO I DO??? Im right now running city water out the r.o. pump, would it help to throw rain-x on every car ya think?? wouldnt help the pocket book, but thats ok...this just really sucks. any help/suggestions would be much appreciated

If your using it for spot free why not throtle the track back a little and use the city water and keep your spttoing to a minimum with your drying agent and city water. We have our drying agent running through a husky air driven pump. When we were working on our RO I turned the conveyor down and throttled the dryaid pump down their were some spots for a day or 2 but no body complained while we worked on the unit. goodluck

I wouldnt put rain x on every car. I would turn up your drying agent. Not because its cheaper. Because very dirty cars getting your most basic wash and rain x will seal the dirt in making it harder to clean the next time they come in, and it will haze the cars.

How does a drying agent reduces the tds of city water? If your ro system is down, tell your Culligan man to set you up with di tanks: temporary fix, but you can be settup in minutes.

Is there any sort of manual run switch that still works? If so you could get a sump switch and wire it in to make it produce RO until it's fixed properly.

nope, nothing working at all...99% sure at this point its the circuit board...they tell me two weeks! spent a quarter million almost on this system, its a year old, and its down for two weeks?? bioshine, drying agent doesnt reduce tds, obviously, but it is making most of the "dirty" water fall off the car, ive acutally never ran without ro before, thank god its summer, our cars dry so much faster, they actually look about 90% ok. thanks for advice fellas, well get thru it...odd coincidence, we also lost the vfd on our wiggle arch the same night...starting to get concerned about possible power spikes...glad i had a spare vfd, and knew how to download the parameters from the old drive, one out of two at least for a day...

ps so whats a di tank?

DI tanks are two cylinders (approx 4 feet high and 10 inches in diameter) each with a resin of opposite charge (+ and -). The tanks are hooked together with hoses and doesn't require any outside power source: just water pressure. Raw water enters the first tank and exits the second tank with a tds of zero. Hookups to these tanks are quick disconnect hoses (provided with the tanks).

Water treatment folks like Culligan rent these tanks. Once the tanks are exhausted Culligan replaces them with fully charged ones and charges you $50 (or something like that). The amount of water treated depends on the condition of the raw water you are treating. You may get 1,000 gallons or 5,000 per set.

Like I said before: a temporary fix. If your water is really nasty, you should consider the tanks. If you don't use the tanks, they don't lose their charge until water starts passing through them again.

http://www.culliganmiami.com/pf5.html

http://www.culligandealer.com/reynoldsh2oplus/csolutions.html

I know someone who has a lot of lightning problems and has stuff knocked out with every storm. He's installed plug-in surge protectors on nearly everything. To protect the VFD you'd need a big one that covers the whole building, but for your smaller stuff that plugs in it might be a cost-effective option to prevent it from happening again.

I've serviced many different RO systems, a lot of which were electronically controlled and some of which were no longer being made and replacement parts were no longer available. In those cases I would gut all the old controls and use only a float switch to control operations. I know it's an extreme thing to do to such a new and expensive piece of equipment, but simplicity brings reliability.

I have 3 culligan ro units. I've never had a mother board go bad. But I have had my delivery pump cause the breaker to trip out the unit. Culligan replace the capacitor o the pump but the problem continued until they replaced the delivery pump under warranty. This happened at two locations.

I would think to check for float and solenoid shorts, you could disconnect all of their leads from the terminal strip in the control box. Then reconnect them one at a time...to see which one is pulling down the control board.

Instead of being down two weeks, I would ask the Culligan man if you could by pass the control panel with temporary toggle switches to generate RO water manually.

Where there's a will, there's a way!

Call another local supplier and service company that works on RO Systems and see what they can do for you.

Bud Abraham

good call panama jim! it was the solenoid shorting out the system, the weekend tech just wasnt all that competent on commercial applications, commercial guy came in mon. morning and got me going...ya know, funny thing was there was very little loss in quality of cars, i think because its summer the cars were dry by the time they got to the vac canopy...we heat the 15 blowers, and we also exhaust our vac turbines into blower room...believe me, its mighty warm in there...thanks all for advice, ive NEVER had ro machine go out before, definitely a new experience for me.