Water backflowing into raw chemical

[Reds]

I have a Jim Coleman WW. The pump stand has tanks with hydrominders. Hydrominder has a water feed at city pressure, and a line that syphons raw undiluted chemical from a drum. Water is getting into my wax drum somehow from the pump stand hydrominder. I replaced the foot valve in the drum when this first happened (2 days ago), but now it has happened again. The only line into the chemical drum is from the hydrominder. I took the hydrominder off yesterday and cleaned it and tryed to figure out how the water was backfeeding into the drum. When cleaning and poking around I thought that I detected some junk in the anti syphon hole in the hose on the bottom of the hydrominder. I thought that hole was to stop chemical from syphoning out of the drum. I checked the foot valve again and the checkvalve in it was destroyed. Any ideas how this could be happening? Thanks in advance for any input.

 

[Greg Pack]

Yes, the hole is there to prevent backflow. It must get air to stop the suction. If your liquid level is too high it will not work as intended.

There are two foot valve colors: blue & grey. Although grey is supposed to be the tough one I have found a couple of products that will ruin it, but won't ruin the blue. So, whatever color you used, I would try the other color next time.

 

[madscientist]

blue is for low ph (acidic) products, grey is for high ph.

 

[Jeff_L]

At some point a foot valve will most likely go bad. I cut a wedge or hole out of the output hose above the mixture line. That way when the foot valve does go bad, the only siphoning is undiluted chemical and air. That way I don't over dilute the chemical when it sucks it back into the line.

 

[Austin]

I had similar issues to my ww. Check the level of the water in the bin after it fills up. If the anti syphen hole is right at the water line (or below) when the float shuts the water off then sometimes it will suck the water back into the soap line and back into the soap drum. I think the conditions have to be right in order to do this (a combo of 2things) a bad foot valve and the anti syphen hole too low. The fix: change the foot valve, then take the float out of the bin and empty some sand out so it is lighter and shuts off quicker and the water level is an inch below the anti syphen hole. I did this to all of my autos and ss bays. For the floats that are stainless I dropped them lower in the bin so they would shut off quicker. I haven't had any issues since.