// ON WATER
WITH BRIAN MADDEN
Water Is Not Something We Think About
C
lean, refreshing water, free of bacteria and viruses. That’s what we want and we take it for granted that it will always be there. But restaurant owners have to work to make sure their water is clean, safe and good tasting for customers. That’s where water filtration systems come in. They clean the water that comes in through the pipes and then disinfect it to make sure nothing is there that shouldn’t be. But the chemicals to do that can often leave a very unpleasant aftertaste. I remember being at a hotel bar with some friends and one commenting, “This place could use your filters. The drinks really taste like chlorine.” It wasn’t coming from the water but from the glass, leftover residual on it from a low-temperature machine with a chlorine-based process. Did you ever go to a diner and see a coffee cup with lipstick on it, or ever get a plate with a piece of dried-up egg yolk on it? Generally it’s from a low-temperature machine. They don’t clean as well. A lot of diners use low temp because their chemical guys give them the machine and sell chemicals into it. It’s safe, it’s disinfected, but it’s not necessarily something you want to eat or drink out of. That’s where water filtration systems come in. Filtration systems come in different configurations. Some products, like our Endurance, do fine filtration followed by finer filtration, and it’s really high-flow, 50 gallons a minute. Endurance SC, our other
Brian Madden is a New Hyde Park , NY native. The Western Connectcut University graduate has built a reputation as one of the nation’s leading experts on water filtration. In his current post with Pentair, he is han-
For every gallon saved of water that is made, restaurant owners send 3 to 4 down the drain as waste. model in this product line, has ultra fine filtration and it’s self-cleaning. It has that ultra fiber membrane that cleans itself. But our product that does the most for restaurants, and filtration, is our MRS600, a 600-gallon per day mineral reduction system that allows you to reduce the amount of dissolved solids in your water. You can reduce none of it or all of it or anything in between and it’s got a blend valve that allows you to go through the reverse osmosis membrane and blends filtered water back with it. Why should restaurant owners care about this? I’ll tell you why. For every gallon saved of water that is made, you send 3 to 4 down the drain as waste. When you start employing a pressure pump
64 • January 2016 • Total Food Service • www.total food.com
on it and get more efficiency out of it, it’s more one to one. It takes two gallons of water to make one gallon, and one gallon is waste. With the MRS600, for every gallon you make, you only send one quart down the drain. But it’s more than energy-efficiency and conservation that foodservice operations worry about. Safety is paramount. A lot of establishments, like the diner I mentioned, use low-temperature machines. They’re fine, they do the job most of the time, but then there’s that instance when dried food turns up on your clean plates. Not very appetizing, or something that would cause a customer to want to return. It’s all about disinfecting your water, and how you choose to do it. With low-temperature machines, you have to use chemicals because the water never gets hot enough to kill the bacteria. We have a client who’s putting in a glass washer and is worried about having to polish the spots out of his glasses because he’s using a low-temperature machine. I explained to him what I’d do. Put a good filter on the front of it, and that will usually do it. But it’s a cold-water feed, using chemi-
dling sales in the Northeast. Madden’s career includes successful stints with Pepsi in Las Vegas, Metro NY with Hoshizaki as well as being deployed by Pentair to China.
cal disinfectant instead of hot water to kill all the germs. Hot-water machines don’t use the chemicals that can make your drinks taste like chlorine. With a low-temperature machine, you’re going to see a film at the end. It’s not because of the water; it’s because of the chemical additives they put in as a disinfectant. If you’re worried about the spots, aside from that, if you don’t get all the particles out of the water, you’re asking for trouble. Here’s how it works. All machines will run at about 140 degrees incoming water to clean dishes and pots and glasses. But to ensure that your dishware is clean, you need 180 degrees and above. And those are the hightemp machines. A high-temp machine, on the other hand, has a booster heater that’s underneath the machine, that, at the final rinse, feeds hot water from the boiler wherever it is – in the basement, in the back of the house, wherever – to the dishwasher. You have to bring the temperature up over 180 degrees for hot-water disinfection to take place. If
continued on page 88