Summary:
- Leaves no water spots even without drying off
- Connects to your hosepipe or pressure washer effortlessly
- Use to fully wash or just final rinse to reduce usage - the latter for best economy
- 7 litre capacity, weighs 6kg, 50cm total height
- Typically 415+ litres of pure filtered water depending on local water hardness, more in many areas
- Supplied ready to use, pre-filled with 7 litres of MB115 resin manufactured under ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 certification
- Refillable with new filtration resin granules - so much lower cost long term
- Supplied filled with resin and 3/4" threads for male adapters for Hozelock hosepipe fixings (adapters not supplied)
- Refilling takes 5 minutes
- No need to empty vessel of water between washes but advisable to run 2-3 litres through every 2 weeks in summer
- Yes - its more expensive than other products like AquaGleem but actually about 2.5x as efficient and thus cheaper for you, and far more efficient than other dumpier vessels. We have been retailing these since 2015.
The details - how it works
This efficient water filter will make your car washing easier - no white water spots and no need to dry the car. Saves time and reduces marring and drying risks.
This 7L filter produces around 415 litres of pure zero parts per million filtered rinse water before the resin needs replacement. In comparison to other, 'window cleaner suppliers' units, the combination of our high quality resin and taller filter makes this more economical. See our detailed explanation why below.
Note that as it is tall and slightly top heavy, you will need to secure it upright - we supply wall brackets which will achieve this. It is illustrated with our 7 Litre filter.
The use of "mixed resin bed" water filters to remove all of the dissolved impurities has long been established in industries such as Pharmaceuticals, electronics and metal surface treatment. More recently, large scale car wash systems (such as tunnel washes), window cleaners and horticulturalists have also been using the products to produce water free from impurities. Note: filled with 7L of resin and ready to use.
For the car wash and window cleaning industry, the advantages are that using water which contains no dissolved impurities allows the user to leave the car or window wet, to dry naturally and with no trace of water marks.
The use of these filters is not simply a case of just connecting up a unit and running water through it though.
The size and shape of the unit has a big impact on the maximum flow rate of the water through the unit, the volume of water that can be treated before the resin needs changing and also the quality of the water produced. The performance of a water filter comes down to contact time between the water and the mixed bed resin within the unit. The longer the contact time, the better the quality of the water will be, as the resin has longer to remove the dissolved ions (or impurities).
The best way to achieve long contact time is to have a good amount of resin in relation to the flow rate of the water. This is represented by what is known as the 40 bed volumes per hour rule. That is the bed volume of resin in the unit multiplied by 40 which gives the optimum flow rate of water for that sized unit per hour. So a unit with 7 litres of resin in should (theoretically) be able to treat up to 280Lts per hour. In real terms this rule is rarely adhered to however, but does give a good guideline to the effectiveness of individual units.
Unfortunately the story doesn´t end there as the "aspect ratio" of the filter also needs to be taken into account. This is basically the height of the filter divided by the diameter. The bigger the aspect ratio (i.e. the taller and thinner the unit) the better the performance will be. This is because the water has a greater depth of resin to pass through and therefore the resin has a greater chance of removing all of the impurities.
A narrower diameter filter will also ensure that the water is distributed across the whole cross sectional area of the filter, thereby using all the resin bed to its maximum capacity.
The standard Race Glaze 7L filter is a 6" diameter by 18" high vessel, which has an aspect ratio of 3. The vast majority of window cleaning filter products are based either on 8"diameter by 17" high vessels which only have an aspect ratio of 2.1 or a 7" by 13" vessels which only has an aspect ratio of 1.9. As such these units can suffer with the external edges of the resin not being fully utilised, and therefore giving lower capacity than the volume of resin would suggest. In the window cleaning industry this isn´t so much of a problem as the filters are generally used as the final stage of a multiple stage purification process.
As such the water is already quite pure before it gets to these filters, so any shortfall in efficiency isn´t really noticed as they have such a low mineral load anyway.
With mains water however the load on the resin is much higher, with the mineral content of the water often being tens of or even a hundred of times higher than the water from the window cleaning purification process.