Mixed oxidant water treatment

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TheCrane

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I recently moved and the city I moved to uses MIOX (mixed oxidant) secondary disinfection. From what I gather from sundry online sources, this is a reaction that uses NaCl and electricity to create various oxidative species. The chlorine smell is very noticeable. Will a charcoal filter remove this, or do I need something else?
 
MIOX, among other manufacturers (Severn Trent, Siemens, et al), is simply a system that produces bleach (sodium hypochlorite = NaOCl) by passing a high concentration salt/water solution across an electrode. MIOX happens to be a proprietary system that does generate other oxidants besides hypochlorite.......but its product is >65% bleach. If you are simply talking about charcoal filtration of your tap water, then YES, that will work if your municipal water supply has been disinfected using MIOX.
 
That looks like a good setup. I am spoiled here in the Denver are where we have amazingly clean water.....and I have never felt the need to filter my tap water for brewing. I know that lots of other places in the USA and the world are not as fortunate as I.

I think your filter will be fine for chlorine/chloramine removal. I saw some other posts about needing a special catalytic carbon to remove chloramine, but that is a myth. Activated carbon works, too, you just may need more of it.....or multiple steps. I think as long as you don't push it with running the filter too long between changes, you should be fine.

I am a consulting engineer that designs water and wastewater treatment plants, so I know a bit about the subject. Instead of writing a full dissertation on this subject from scratch, I did find some good Google search results that couldn't have said this any better. Here is an excerpt I found online. The "catalytic" carbon they talk about.......often if you see the trade name CENTAUR, that is it. Centaur is a proprietary catalytic carbon manufactured by Calgon. Some houses these days, especially where there are very hard waters, I see reverse osmosis (RO) systems being installed. They will remove chloramines, too.......and, well, basically everything else to be concerned about.

The whole reduction discussion for chloramines can become quite complex, but the main thing you need to know is that chloramine is removed from water with essentially the same strategies that are used to remove chlorine. This means that carbon filtration is the best removal method, and, contrary to urban legends, filter carbon does indeed remove chloramine. The problem is that it takes more carbon and more contact time to do the job. In practical terms this means that if your city disinfects your tap water with chloramines you’ll need to get a larger and better carbon filter than you would need if chlorine alone were used.

For drinking water you can consider high quality carbon units like Multi-Pure, or double and triple units that use lots of carbon. And, contrary to another widely promoted myth, reverse osmosis units do remove chloramine. In fact, they do it well, because any good RO unit contains a couple of carbon filters and the water gets an extra slow pass through the first one.

In choosing carbon for chloramine removal, a specially prepared carbon called “catalytic” carbon is far superior to regular carbon.
 
Wow, thanks for all the info. Its been awhile since I've posted here and I almost forgot how helpful and knowledgeable the people of this community are.
 

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