HYDROLATOR - Warning

HYDROLATOR files sharp practice complaint with Federal Trade
Commission on July 20, 2001.... What you can do when they show up....
A typical case is described.... The Purdue Report critiqued....

The competitive tactics used by chemical water treatment salesmen in a desperate effort to try to keep HYDROLATOR out of their market have followed a frustrating but familiar pattern of sharp business practices:

(1) As soon as HYDROLATOR appears at one of their sites, the chemical salesman and occasionally a chemical "swat-team" descends on the client. The alarm is raised that plant failure will result if the client uses magnets or magnetic devices (also referred to as gadgets). They cleverly link HYDROLATOR with the "gadgeteers"
(2) Armed with negative "reports" about magnetic gadget failures, they successfully (in many cases) scare off the client. Please note that the client is usually unaware that :
(a) The failed gadget industry has not been successful and is virtually unknown in the Power and Steel industry marketplace. With the exception of a very few industrial sites with very small applications,

(b) HYDROLATOR does not sell gadgets, and all of the negative literature cited by chemical salesmen has nothing to do with HYDROLATOR's proven track record in custom designed,100's of KGPM systems
(c) The "reports", usually paper review or opinion letters, are mainly from captive labs or "world's leading consultants" friendly to or directly employed by the chemical industry.
(d) However, some positive reports from the gadget industry do exist: API, NASA, Grutch etc. Busch etc. (see "The Magic Water Treatment Gadgets and How They Grew... a paper I wrote in the early eighties.) There are a few 20-30 year old gadget companies who are fairly successful in residential and commercial applications. By manifolding their small devices, companies have treated 5 and even 10,000 GPM systems.
(e) The Langelier Saturation Index, dating back to the 30's is one of the weapons used against HYDROLATOR because it always predicts scaling in HYDROLATOR systems where scaling, by the way, is non-existent. This phenomenon is due to the higher electrical potential induced in HYDROLATOR controlled bulk water which increases solubility of scale salts, thereby negating LSI's ability to forecast. In every LSI "scaling warning" report situation I've witnessed, HYDROLATOR's Water Systems are visibly descaling! One chemical treatment handbook even recommends deposit monitoring over the indices for reasons of accuracy. It describes how "Two different waters, one of low hardness and corrosive, the other with high hardness and therefore scale-forming can have the same Langelier Saturation Index (LSI). The following article from Chemical Processing publicized as early as 1985 that

The report which follows has been widely referred to by the chemical industry to effectively block the magnetic "gadget" industry in general, and HYDROLATOR's Electric Water Treatment in particular. My grateful thanks to Joe Harrison, Technical Director of the Water Quality Association for allowing us to present this and many other reports on our private web site reading room. My thanks also to associate professor Jim Alleman of Purdue's School of Civil Engineering for taking time to discuss this test with me. I first spoke to Jim Alleman in 1986 about the glaring deficiency I saw in the test set-up. I explained that the velocity through the PMWCD's tested was too low to get any electrical charge build-up in the water (1.635 ft./sec.) A further flaw was in the addition of only .08333 of the heater capacity every 30 minutes instead of a continuous flow through; a dilution of the now very weakly charged water to the 6 gallons of heater reservoir water was the result. Normally, "magnetized" water will bleed off its charge to ground over hours or days, depending on conductivity of the water. Given the average 4 hours detention time between partial addition, the result would be to weaken the diluted charge even more. I originally asked Jim Alleman if the chemical industry had advised on the test set-up. ( I suspected they might because the set-up looked suspiciously like a "design-to-failure" which would have been to their advantage) to my surprise, he said that the gadget salesmen had advised him.

CONCLUSION

No PMWCD I'm aware of or have tested, including my own best design, would have shown any positive result in this project. The test, however well constructed, was doomed to failure before it began. In practice once through applications are difficult enough to do successfully. A re-circulating loop might have yielded positive data but would have required several times the velocity. Sufficient water velocity through a magnetic field creates electrical energy in the bulk water ( see Michael Faraday's work(1832)) thus emulating an electrical generator. The responsibility for the flawed Purdue set-up and the widely publicized failures in gadget application in general rests with the gadgeteer industry: It's the inability and/or unwillingness to do the research, test the designs scientifically using corrosion/scaleometry methods, and then bring to market products which do the job consistently and well, that explains the lack of acceptance in the marketplace. There are a few successful companies, but these are few and far between. This explains why the industry has never progressed; and why the widely accepted use of this technology, which can ultimately replace polluting chemicals, has not yet come to fruition. (See also"The Magic Water Treatment Gadgets and How They Grew")

Ted Light

The U.S. Army CERL Report
(a critique)

We thought you would be interested in HYDROLATOR’s rebuttal to this report. Apparently, it is being circulated to the power generation community by the chemical water treatment industry and their friends.

This test project was a waste of time and taxpayer dollars! And, although these circulated reports have nothing to do with HYDROLATOR, I continue to be painted with the same brush: magnetic water treatment. So, from time to time, I’m compelled to come forward and explain why the gadgeteers continue to fail, the tests fail and the result is that the chemical industry circulation of these reports ultimately poison HYDROLATOR’s well.

Pages 14 and 15 (CERL) reveal how, again and again, researchers fail to structure a test, which will successfully detect the effect of a magnetic field on flowing water that they’re looking for. Worse, this test, like the very thorough but useless 2-year WQA funded test done at Perdue in the early 80’s was constructed on advice and directions from the gadgeteer companies!

Let’s look at how and why the CERL test failed!

(1) Insufficient Energy – To adequately produce descaling and corrosion (cathodic) protection, the magnetic field must be strong enough to generate bulk water electro-static potential, (up to but rarely reaching 950MVDC). This phenomenon was first discovered by Michael Faraday in 1832, and confirmed by NACE member corrosion engineers testing HYDROLATOR against an ICCPS in 1986. An exact emulation of their Impressed Current Cathodic Protection System voltage was confirmed. Gadgets that we’ve tested fall short in this area. However, there are hundreds of gadget reports we’ve collected in our library since the 50’s numbering 80% positive and 20% negative. From reading the negatively biased CERL report, however, one would assume the opposite to be true. From my experience, many gadgets succeed, because the system energy threshold required is low enough to allow descaling despite their poor design.

(2) Flow Rate – In my opinion, the Perdue test was the worst set-up so far: a beaker water sample was taken from the once-through loop every few hours, resulting in virtually no flow and no charge to the test water! CERL isn’t much better. Given flow of 1-2 ft/sec through the gadgets, one could not detect much more than a few millivolts or so of electrostatic potential, far below the ambient 10-25 MVDC corrosion reaction and scale formation potential!

(3) Once-through Set-up – From my experience, one pass through a relatively weak magnetic field at 1-2 ft/sec will yield little or no detectable energy. If the CERL loop were re-circulated, one might possibly detect positive results.