DENVER, CO, USA, Nov. 12, 2007 -- Veteran workers at a busy water treatment plant have praised Panton McLeod's water quality products after witnessing the first U.S. demonstration projects.
Jim Angers, Superintendent at city of Lebanon Water Plant, in New Hampshire, was with colleagues to see the PM 55 product at work in their 35,000 gallon clean water tank.
He said: "We were impressed and really liked what we saw. Our tank walls and the pumping equipment were heavily manganese stained and the way this took it off was pretty amazing.
"We normally figure it's an all day job to take a tank down for cleaning. It's at least five or six hours and we have to use a fire hose and heavy brushes to clean it up. Then we pump it out and put water through until it runs clear.
"With the Panton McLeod product it was all done in less than three hours and it was really clean -- I'm talking cleaner than it's ever been before. One of my colleagues here is an 18 year man and he's never seen it this clean.
"It is right back to the concrete and the only unfortunate thing was if we'd known it would be this clean we'd have factored in more time so that we could have put an approved coating on the concrete."
Jim and his team serve a population which varies from 10,050 to 40,000 and typically put out between 2 million to 3.25 million gallons of water per day. The plant uses a conventional treatment process, including flocculation, sedimentation, filtration and chlorination.
The manganese content is a hallmark of the local water and although it never goes beyond the aesthetic range it typically leaves a difficult-to-remove encrustation on water structures where there is prolonged contact.
A pilot project is under way to introduce potassium permanganate dosing during the treatment process, which would reduce manganese staining.
Jim added: "That is still some way off and in the meantime this PM cleaning product is as good as anything I've seen for cleaning manganese staining."
A unit of Melrose, Scotland-based Panton McLeod Ltd., Panton McLeod Americas (www.pantonmcleod.com) has its head office in the Denver suburb of Lakewood, CO.
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