City flushing water lines and hydrants

[ncwg]

the city says they will be flushing lines for 4 days, they say to not do any laundry because of rusty water that will stain any clothes. They say that the water will look brown and rusty, so what will this do to the car wash quality? Do i need to do any thing to protect the wash it self? tell me about your experience with this, thank.

 

[MEP001]

You'll want to protect your RO system, either turn it off for those four days if you have enough storage, or replace your prefilter with something really fine. I remember a wash with some sort of ultra-fine silt in the water that would ruin membranes every two months, and he added a .35 micron prefilter which solved the issue.

 

[pitzerwm]

You might try to find out when they will do your street. Over the 4 days they will be doing the whole city. You won't need to worry about it until they do your street, then that day or hours, you might close.

 

[Randy]

I?ve been there and done that more than once. Like Pitzer said find out what day they are going to do your area of town and shut down the car wash. The first time they flushed the mains in front of my wash they stirred up everything from fine sediment, rust scale, sand, small rocks to plastic pipe cuttings it took days to get everything clean out. Now I turn off the water and close down the wash for the day, then flush out my piping after every settles down.

 

[mjwalsh]

Usually, if it is just the hydrants it isn't too bad in our city. I do have some some serious memories like Randy describes but it tended to be when they were change valve in the street. When we needed to put in a new water main hookup & increase our size from 2" to 4" the private contractor was going to use a garden hose to flush out the newly placed pipe. Myself & the inspector made sure that they found a fire hose to do it properly. The changing of a valve was also done by a private contractor & they gave us almost no warning. Understand these situations required the water to be shut off completely for at least a few hours. In our situation with well over 150 mixing valve ports with mesh filters etc. besides the car wash inlet valves & filters & RO etc. it could have been expensive.