0.22 Micron Water Filters. What Gets Filtered Out?

Australia & New Zealand Homebrewing Forum

Help Support Australia & New Zealand Homebrewing Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Fat Bastard

Brew Cvlt Doom
Joined
11/8/11
Messages
914
Reaction score
226
So, I have a 0.22 micron Millipore water filter in the appropriate housing. I was going to modify the housing to use as a hop rocket, but I've discovered a supply of the filters and would like to try filtering Sydney water through it for the purposes of brewing with it.

I'm led to believe that the filter will pull out chlorine and bacteria, but does it pull out any of the "good" stuff? Do I need to adjust my salt additions to compensate?

All the gear and no idea.

Cheers for your input.

FB.
 
0.22 micron is a sterile filter. If you use it as a hop rocket you will probably not be able to push a lot of beer through before clogging. We filter water through these at work constantly, but anything else and the filter is one use then chuck out.

It will remove bacteria and other living things out of water, but not minerals etc.
 
It wont filter out Cl, Fl or anything else dissolved in the water for that you need a carbon filter.
As your water gets boiled for an hour or so bacteria aren't really going to be a problem (usually).
So maybe a proper water filter (i.e. 2 stage Particulate/Carbon) or a Ro Mo system if you want really clean water and use this one as a hop rocket.
Mind you most anything made by Millipore costs an arm and a leg and tends to be very well made, might be worth selling and putting the money into a different water filter.
Mark
 
Unless it is a millipore filter designed to run continuously (for it's specified lifetime) on a MilliQ system it probably isn't all that suitable. If it is, then it is overkill. These filters are designed for lab use. Follow Mark's sage advice re 2-stage filters. One sediment filter and a 1 micron carbon filter is all you need.
 
GalBrew said:
0.22 micron is a sterile filter. If you use it as a hop rocket you will probably not be able to push a lot of beer through before clogging. We filter water through these at work constantly, but anything else and the filter is one use then chuck out.

It will remove bacteria and other living things out of water, but not minerals etc.
Oh, I wasn't planning on trying to use the filter element for the hop rocket, Just the housing. I had devised a system of varying grades of mesh and scrubby material for the "filtration" part of the hop rocket, but it remains untested! I was given the housing some time ago, but the dude that gave me the housing discovered some filters for it and I thought I'd try it as a water filter and see what happened.

MHB said:
It wont filter out Cl, Fl or anything else dissolved in the water for that you need a carbon filter.
As your water gets boiled for an hour or so bacteria aren't really going to be a problem (usually).
So maybe a proper water filter (i.e. 2 stage Particulate/Carbon) or a Ro Mo system if you want really clean water and use this one as a hop rocket.
Mind you most anything made by Millipore costs an arm and a leg and tends to be very well made, might be worth selling and putting the money into a different water filter.
Mark
Ok cool, so it'll only filter out the bioburden from the water. Sounds like I probably don't need it for my purposes.

I've noticed that it's rated up to 135c. Will it filter out the rusty crap that comes from my hot water system so I can use that and save some time waiting for the water to heat up on brewday?

Do the carbon filters or RO systems remove everythin gfrom the water? I can actually get RO from work in any quantity I could conceivably use in my system, but haven't really delved into the practicalities of using it.
 
Very small stuff, at work we consider anything below 0.45µm to be "dissolved" this is a lab convention.

To filter out the rust crap from your HWS you would only need to filter at 1µm even a 5µm would get rid of most of it. But I don't suggest using hot tap water because of some of the ions you get in it from the HWS and hot water being a better solvent than cold.

A 2-stage filter will remove the rust crap and other floaty bits in the water, probably with a 5µm or 1µm sediment filter and then the organics and Cl2 will be removed by the Carbon, they bind to sites on the surface of the carbon. Neither will remove ions in solution effectively, so F- will remain as will Pb, Cd and As if you are unfortunate enough to have them in your water supply. To remove these you need ion exchange or RO.

RO will be close to pure H2O allowing for the CO2 which dissolves out of the atmosphere almost instantly. Typically an RO system will remove 95-98% of the ions in the water so if you are starting with water at 130ppm TDS it will be down to 7ppm or less.

Is the system at work suitable for drinking? Being RO it should be fine from a chemical point of view and boilling will solve the micro problem. You will need to add salts to your water for brewing.

And what GalBrew said it sounds like a filter for a lab and with Millipore on it, if you can get them fro nicks sell them on to labs looking for cheap filters. Does it look like one of these?
$_35.JPG


As an aside imagine the hops you could put into a TCLP apparatus, they are about 2.5-3L.
 
Not sure if the RO at work is suitable for drinking... I've heard people say that it's not good to drink, but it's used in pharmaceutical manufacturing processes and washdown, so I'm sure it wouldn't be harmful. I've played around with Bru'n water using a percentage of RO and salts addition to build profiles similar to some of the given historical profiles in the spreadsheet, but have never actually done it in real life, and I'm not sure why I would want to given that Sydney water is nice and soft and only requires minor balancing salt additions.

Still, I'm looking for anything that will improve my beer, so nothing is ruled out if it can be done easily and cheaply.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top