Refresh Pure Water®.
Is our flagship ‘pure’ steam distilled ‘vapor compressed’ drinking and industrial water.
Refresh’s process is a copy of Mother Nature’s evaporative cycle of water purification. Mother Nature starts with contaminated water, whether on land or in the salty oceans. With the help of the sun, water is evaporated by changing it from a liquid into a vapor.
The rising vapor consists of pure water molecules – H20 only – leaving all contaminants behind that were previously associated with and attached to the water molecule. And, that was whether the contaminants were dissolved salt and other items in the oceans, or the water on land in a muddy puddle with numerous dissolved minerals, metals, chemicals, and potentially dangerous pathogens like bacteria, cysts and viruses.
Mother Nature continues the never-ending cycle of water purification undertaken since the earth was formed and water started to flow. Water vapor collected in the clouds condenses into liquid or solid hail, sleet or snow flakes, that fall back to earth. The endless water purification process continues and is vitally essential to the maintenance of health for all of the creatures on earth.
The Refresh Pure Water® process:
Refresh uses a patented process called vapor compression.
It is thoroughly modern using the latest thermodynamic process so that the cold input water is exposed to heat from previously created steam and an electrical element, bringing the water to the boil. Because typical waters ‘mixtures’ have portions that will boil at a lower temperature than of water, those portions must be removed in a simple ‘de-gassing’ operation, before the main boiling part of the process is started. Once the thermodynamically heated input water has been ‘de-gassed’, the major remaining portion is introduced to the main boiling chamber to be boiled to produce steam.
We could use almost any input water including spring, bore and brackish waters, but our main source is rainwater collected into storage tanks at our Toowoomba plant holding over 70,000 litres. Alternatively, we use processed town, spring or mineral water. Any of them through our patented vapor compression process will produce the identical pure steam distilled drinking or industrial water.
The rain or town and other feed waters are forced through sediment filters, to remove sediment from the roof and town water pipes, plus algae from the rainwater tanks.
Potentially dangerous carcinogenic tri halo methanes (THM’s) formed by chlorine gas previously injected into town water and combined with organic material is removed by activated carbon filtration. Next, the Input water is treated through a water softening ion exchange system to reduce the hardness to less than 1 part per million (ppm) in order to avoid any plating in the distiller by destructive calcium and magnesium dissolved in most town waters.
With the softening process, we are able to use a range of low TDS rainwaters through to brackish waters containing high concentrations of other dissolved solids and still produce an ultra pure steam distilled drinking water below one (ppm) of totally dissolved solids (TDS).
Note: by definition, an ultra pure steam distilled drinking water can contain up to 5 ppm TDS, or over 5 times more than our normal Refresh Pure Water®.
The steam vapor created inside the distiller is collected and compressed (vapor compression) by a rotating internal compressor, and cooled by a thermodynamic heat transfer system into liquid distilled water. The latent heat of condensation brings the cold input water close to boiling, and once underway, the system becomes a continuous process, with only intermittent heat required from the heating elements. The vapor compression method allows us to repeat Mother Nature’s process only two metres off the ground in a very cost effective way.
• In the distilling process, as written above, non H20 products are ‘left behind’. The left behind portion still in liquid form is called ‘reject’.
Depending on the input level of the dissolved solids, the reject water drawn out of the boiling chamber varies from 10 to 20% of the input, and is actually purer due to the boiling process than when obtained from the city, bore (could be spring water before bottling), tank, dam or lake. In the case of a typical high totally dissolved solids (TDS) town, spring, bore, dam or lake water, the approximately 20% reject might be several thousand parts per million, and way above the maximum 500 ppm for drinking water as recommended by the World Health Organization of the United Nations.
That reject water goes into the sewer, but a portion is saved for watering plants or washing the concrete floors. In the case of rainwater as input water, it is quite pure off the roof, except for an unacceptable pathogen level. Since it is boiled in the distillation process, all of the pathogens are neutralized, and the reject is recycled back into the rainwater tanks for re-use.
This is important in a drought situation, because with input rainwater, 100% will be distilled and filled into bottles for consuming customers, so that there is no waste, until the re-cycled rainwater exceeds 400 ppm out of the reject part of the distiller. At that point the former rainwater now over 400 ppm goes into the sewer.
The steam distilled water from the distiller passes through a post active carbon filter on its way to a bulk storage tank. The active carbon filters remove any potentially carcinogenetic tri halo methanes (THM’s) that may have been created within the distilling process. Prior to bottling, the water will be ozonated (more information following) for our discriminating drinking as well as industrial customers.
We encourage visits to ours and any of our Refresh Pure Water® nationwide plants to better understand our unique production process.
Our Toowoomba plant at 600 Boundary Street is open to the public Monday to Friday from 8 to 5.
We will show you how we produce the purest ‘sweet like rainwater’ drinking water in Queensland and Northern NSW – using Mother Nature’s long established water purification process.
Vapor compression distillers in use throughout the Australian Refresh Pure Water® network vary in production capability from 900 to over 4000 litres per hour.
All distilled water after being boiled, regardless of the distillation process, coming out of a distiller is devoid of free oxygen. The ‘free’ oxygen leaves the water during the boiling process, and without it gives the cooled distilled drinking water an undesirable ‘burnt’ or ‘cooked’ taste.
In preparation to giving Refresh its desired ‘rainwater taste’, we produce ozone (O3) in a similar way to Mother Nature with her lightning strikes.
Produced ozone is bubbled through the water in storage and during bottling to re-oxygenate and insure total pathogen free water will be bottled. The ozone in the water being bottled also kills all of the airborne bacteria inside the ‘disinfected’ bottle being filled. In a few hours, the ozone entrained in the water reverts to the oxygen (O2) we breathe, leaving a nicely oxygenated water with that desirable ‘rainwater taste’.
• It is also a water that will not turn green in the bottle when exposed to sunlight, and allows an indefinite use by date in contrast to all of the bottled spring waters who demand their water be kept out of the sun and have a limited ‘best before’ date.
You can read more on Ozone it the discussion on our Drink up ®: ultra pure reverse osmosis drinking water.
Many new parents, having read our brochure and seen our posters, are assured they can use our Refresh Pure Water® for their babies without boiling.
We know of no other commercially available water able to make that claim for the purity of their drinking water.
Let’s talk about Drink up ®, our ‘Ultra Pure’ Reverse Osmosis (RO) drinking water.
