If you’re installing a UV drinking water system under your kitchen sink, then a typical flow rate for this type of UV system is 1-9 gallons per minute, such as the Viqua VH200).
But if you’re considering a whole-house UV water sterilizer system, a typical system can treat 8-10 gallons of water per minute. The system’s flow rate impacts the amount of UV light treating your household water, and you’ll want a system that can treat the minimum dosage rating to protect your household.
For proper protection from 99.99% of waterborne microbiological contaminants, most whole-house UV systems will have a UV dosage rating of 30 millijoules of UV per square centimeter (mj/cm2). This dosage will protect against a wide array of dangerous microbes.
Suggested Reading: UV Buyer's Guide
Disinfect Your Household Plumbing and UV in 8 Steps
One of the great aspects of Ultraviolet or UV water disinfection for well or surface water is that it’s a light disinfection process and does not add any potentially harmful chemicals to your family’s water. UV systems will kill all the bacteria in your water as the water passes through the UV, but what about the potentially infected water that is downstream of the UV?
Since there isn’t a disinfection residual, it’s important that the entire plumbing system located after the UV be chemically disinfected initially to ensure that the water is free from any bacteriological contaminants. The disinfection process must be performed as part of the UV installation and repeated whenever the UV is shut down for service, it’s operated without power (like during a power outage), or had been inoperative for any reason.
- Shut off the upstream water supply that feeds water into the Ultraviolet Disinfection System and depressurize your water system by opening a downstream faucet.
- Remove the pre-filter cartridge from the sump nearest the UV chamber and fill the sump with 2-3 cups of household (5.25%) bleach (chlorine) and close the sump. At all times during this process, make sure the UV system (and lamp) is turned on and operational!
- Re-pressurize water system by turning the water back on.
- Starting with the faucet farthest away and working your way back, open each faucet and allow cold water to run until you detect chlorine using hot tub test strips, as shown in this YouTube video of mine https://youtu.be/1dD2eavyb5E and then immediately shut the faucet off and repeat the process for each faucet and fixture. You must ensure that all water sources located after the UV, including outside faucets, dishwashers, shower heads, washing machines, connections to refrigerators, toilets, etc., pass chlorinated water.
- Once you’ve finished with the cold water, repeat the whole process with the hot water. The hot water may need to run for quite a while before you detect the chlorine because of the large quantity of water in the hot water tank which will dilute the chlorine. Again, make sure you get a chlorine residual at every hot water source.
- Once all the water locations have passed chlorine, you will need to leave the chlorine to sit in the pipes for a period of 4 hours. Do not use any water during this time. The chlorine needs this contact time to make sure it kills all of the bacteria in your home, cottage, or cabin.
- Reinstall the pre-filter cartridge into the filter housing.
- After 4 hours, flush the chlorine solution from the system until the chlorine smell is gone. Don’t be surprised if there is a lot of discolored water coming out of the faucets. Make sure that each fixture that was disinfected is completely flushed of chlorine.
Do not consume water until the complete system has been flushed. Run the washing machine without clothes in it to flush out all of the chlorine.
Additional reading:
Alfred Moen; Inventor Created Single-Handle Sink Faucet, UVDF
For more uvc disinfection faucet for sale, please check now.
Gary the Water Guy:
When installing an ultraviolet disinfection system, you’ve probably noticed in the instructions, it says to make sure you disinfect the plumbing. And then as in the instructions, it explains how to do that. But boy, does it ever seem complicated? And wait a second. I thought that’s why you bought this system in the first place. Well, in this video, I’m going to explain to you why you need to do it, how you need to do it, and when you need to do it in eight easy steps.
Hi, I’m Gary the Water Guy, and I simplify water filtration to help you conquer crappy water for your family. One of the advantages of ultraviolet disinfection to make sure your water is bacteria-free in your home, cottage, or cabin is that there’s no residual. There’s no chemical that’s gone into the water to kill the bacteria, but that residual hangs around afterward.
So it works off light and light kills the bacteria. But when you do an installation of an ultraviolet disinfection system, the water that’s downstream of the ultraviolet disinfection system may very well have bacteria in it. So what you need to do is you need to chemically disinfect that water using chlorine or bleach to kill the bacteria so that you can be confident that this system is going to make sure your home, cottage, or cabin is bacteria-free going forward.
So the first step that you need to do is you need to shut off the water coming into the system. Now, if you’re doing this as part of your installation, that may very well already be completed. So you shut off the water before, after the system, you open up a faucet, depressurize the whole system.
And then the next step is you need to remove the last filter before the ultraviolet disinfection chamber. So this is a three-stage ultraviolet system. This is our HuM Safe Water 10 System so water flows in through this side, goes through a sediment filter first, carbon filter second, and then the ultraviolet light before it goes on. So the last filter is the carbon filter. So then you would just use the wrench to loosen up this filter housing. You can see this one’s already loose. And then what you would do is you would remove the filter housing, remove the filter that’s inside, dump out all the water and then add about two or three cups of bleach to the system
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