Aftertaste after pickling watermaker ?

[SvenG]

Our Katadyn 160E has made us over 500 gallons of delicious water over the last year or so with careful 5-gallon freshwater rinsing after each saltwater run.

When we were leaving Senta to fend for herself for two months in La Paz (Mx) we pickled the unit per the included instructions using the pickling powder included with the unit.

When we came back we de-pickled the watermaker and the pickling worked as evidenced by the fact that the production rate is the same as before the pickling (6+ gallons per hour). We are using non-chlorinated RO water supplied by the marina for the de-pickling and so far we've run 25 gallons of rinse water through the unit.

The non-chlorinated RO water measures about 200 ppm out of the tap and the product water that results from running the watermaker with the RO rinse-water measures between 2 and 6 ppm !!!

But .... the water definitely has a bit of taste now that it didn't have before. We've replaced the pre-filter just in case it was the source but that hasn't taken care of the problem and the taste is still there.

The tap non-chlorinated RO water supplied by the marina which we are using to rinse the WM has no bad taste at all so that is not the source.

Have we just not run enough rinse water through the WM or should we be running the WM with the valve set to clean rather than run/produce or is there something else we might be doing wrong ?

We head back out into the Sea of Cortez in a couple of weeks and I'd really like to get back our superb home-made water before we leave.

Thanks for any insights.



-Sven

[SV THIRD DAY]

I would stop with the fresh water flushing with dock water at this point, and run the water maker pulling in sea water. The La Paz estuary water is fine to make water with on an incoming tide. It just takes a little time for the unit to purge itself out. In addition to killing growth, picking reagents can also interact it the plastic sea water and product watet tubing.