Dryden Activated Filter Media and What Model Filter Is This?

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I am speaking specifically about the "activate filter media".

I read the material they have available on their website and to be honest it reads like modern snake oil making promises it simply can't keep based on the evidence they provide, or more aptly they don't provide any evidence at all.

A couple of the dubious and unsupported claims they make include:
"The activated surface of AFM® is self-sterilizing which prevents bacteria mud-balling"

Self-sterilizing is a very ambitious claim and needs some serious science to back up something like that. They make no reference as to how they came up with or support this claim.


" Similar to activated carbon, the surface nano-structure adsorbs pollutants from the water but unlike carbon, AFM®is recharged by just back-washing with water."

How is this recharge accomplished? You are using the same water to backflush the filter as you are filtering. There is nothing magic that happens the backflush process you simply reverse the water flow thru the filter and dump the water to waste. How does the glass know to just release all the absorbed pollutants yet retain the same pollutants when the water goes the other direction. They need some serious scientific explanation of how they managed to accomplish this.

The only claim they make that I believe and I mentioned in my first reply is that the media is able to trap particles in a micron range smaller than plain pool sand can. I also explained why it was able to do that and what I saw as an issue with that. I offered a much cheaper and easier way to get the same results in particle retention in a sand bed. That is to add DE in small amounts to the sand bed.


The other swimming pool products they are offering 2 chemicals, that they don't offer an MSDS for, and a "free radical" generator are snake oil at best, and since you have no idea what they are adding to your water they could be very harmful you just don't know. They offer pictures of pools with water so clear you can't see the water as proof, funny thing is I have pictures of my pool and have see many other pools that follow TFP methods which has the same levels of water clarity. The difference being we can tell you exactly how we got the water that clear and simple methods we used to get it there.

I am open to discussion on their pool products if you have some actual data and references to back it up.
 
It's hard to evaluate Dryden Aqua's claims as all that is available are their own marketing materials. The website provides links to "studies" but, once again, those links are summaries of various technical studies and those summaries are all produced by Dryden Aqua. If you wish to post actual peer reviewed scientific papers from a respected journal in the field of research (such as "Water Research"), I'd be happy to evaluate the claims and merits. But, unfortunately, marketing materials don't count.

I have actually looked at the Dryden Aqua site many times and, yes, they have a very advanced filtration system to offer. It conforms to EU and German standards and produces very clean water. As others have alluded to, German standards are really not applicable to US residential pools because German and EU standards oppose the use of cyanuric acid stabilizer in pools. When CYA is present, the reaction rates and types of reactions change considerably and many of the THMs and DBPs you list are either never generated or generated in such low quantities as to be easily ignored. UV light from outdoor exposure destroys most of them as UV interacts with chlorinated pool water to form both hydroxyl radicals and chlorine radicals.

As for the glass filtration media, sure it's great. But at what cost? Most residential pools don't need that level of fine filtration from the enhanced surface roughness of the media. Better filtration performance can be had from cartridge or DE filters if that's desired. As for radical generation, that's going to be entirely dependent on how much of the metal oxide is exposed to water (ie, treated glass surface not coated with particulates and dead algae) and the presence of an oxidation source to generate the radicals in the first place. In most water treatment applications of metal oxide glass media, a strong oxidizer is present (ie, ozone, peroxide and/or UV) to generate the free radicals that help to destroy organic compounds. If you look at the actual Dryden Aqua system as a whole, they are very advanced filtration systems that use chlorine removal, granular activated carbon, coagulants and injection of strong oxidizers (peroxide and titanium dioxide particles) to help generate free radicals. The final steps are more chemical filtration and then very low concentrations of chlorine injection just prior to returning the water back to the pool. So, I don't think you can take one part out of the system, ie, the AFM glass media, and then put that into a standard US residential pool and expect anywhere near the same performance.

I'm not disputing that the AFM materials will work, but it's always a matter of cost effectiveness. Standard #20 pool sand can be used for decades without issue as long as the pool owner takes care of it. This is why TFP always urges sand filter owners to annually deep clean their filter media to break up the compacted media and help remove clumps and organic matter. If pool owners put in this minimal amount of filter care each year, then pool sand is more than adequate for any residential pool. Unfortunately, on the service side of the pool business, service professionals deal with pool owners that do next-to-nothing to take care of their pools and so these huge problems appear to be ubiquitous leading to the search for "the next best thing" in pool care. Many in the service industry just want to find "the thing" that will help solve the pool owner's problems and make their service jobs easier. But, if you step back and compare TFP pools and pool owners to the larger group, you'll find TFP pools rarely ever run into these issues because TFP pools are maintained much better. In that case, from the standpoint of TFP, all the chemical tricks & gizmos are completely unnecessary. TFP is about educating and empowering pool owners to take control of their own pools so that they can be enjoyable rather than money-pits draining them of their time and energy.
 
There are as many ways to effectively maintain a pool as there are to cook a meal..


Anyway, titanium dioxide is actually some pretty interesting stuff.. I don’t see it transcending recreational water treatment. I believe it has been “played” for nearly a century.
Here’s a “bibliography” from a proprietary white paper I was reading last week.

Why was I reading it? Just because I have the time.

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446a2b84c9bca1d48202faf37f75d74d.jpg
 
I just looked at the Dryden system- I get the jist of & no desire to be negate or endorse somebody’s work/product. That’s science’s job.

What has my curiosity, is who is packaging ACO component?

The description has me thinking about a proprietary product called “summer shield.” I have always want to know what is in those SS, bottles. (I believe I’ve been close. I think it was the Fire reactivity & extinguishing that got me close.. then the trail went cold & I got busy (or vice versa)
 
There have been many claims over the years, both silly and serious, about the use of advanced oxidation processses (AOP’s) and hydroxyl radical formation in swimming pool sanitation. The claims made rarely ever pan out. There are methods for producing AOP’s in bodies of water and Dryden Aqua comes about the closest to practically achieving those goals. The downside is their total system installation and expense costs can only be justified in large commercial/public pool settings or aquatic systems. For residential pools, everything they sell is complete overkill and way beyond the skills and training of any professional pool service to take care of.

ZeoSand, glass media, AFM, you name it, it’s simply not worth the money when one can get decades of useful life out of properly cared for #20 pool sand.
 
It’s probanly colloidal titanium dioxide particles (nanometer scale with a surfactant modifier to keep them in suspension) and, if an oxidizer is present, peroxide. Titanate has been know for decades to act as a catalyst for the formation of hydroxyl radicals when exposed to UV light. It’s also totally inert and causes no harm to aquatic ecosystems.

It’s also been used as a pure white substitute for good old lead oxide based paints. Just remember kids, those paint chips aren’t edible....at least not without a good spicy salsa.....
 
JoyfulNoise said:
It’s probanly colloidal titanium dioxide particles (nanometer scale with a surfactant modifier to keep them in suspension) and, if an oxidizer is present, peroxide. Titanate has been know for decades to act as a catalyst for the formation of hydroxyl radicals when exposed to UV light. It’s also totally inert and causes no harm to aquatic ecosystems.

It’s also been used as a pure white substitute for good old lead oxide based paints. Just remember kids, those paint chips aren’t edible....at least not without a good spicy salsa.....
Click to expand...


Thanks joyful..

Isn’t that in coppertone?

That isn’t where my “what is “sustain summer shield”?”” personal quest was going but I’ll pursue it too..
 
Just a practical comment, and a question.

Recycled glass has been fine for our pool. Same cost, does the job, re-uses a waste product (smelled like stale beer when it went in). Maybe a slight difference in DE charging.

No eye discomfort from microscopic glass that I'm aware of, but that leads to my question. I believe it's cleaned before it goes in, and of course it was backwashed and rinsed first thing when we started up and many times since. No smell of beer in the pool! So is it possible the media is putting microscopic glass in the pool? Is that bad? Is deep cleaning OK? I've only got one good eye, so I'm more than a bit paranoid on this topic.
 

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Anything large enough to affect your eyes would sink and get vacuumed up. I’m sure washing and rinsing the media is more than adequate to remove any dust or debris. Your eye is fine :pirat:
 
DolphinRep said:
Glass dust and silica dust would undoubtedly enter the pool. To my knowledge silica dust is the only one of the two to be a known carcinogen.

The glass media that smelled like beer was not Dryden product correct?
Click to expand...

Dry Crystalline silica dust (calcined DE would be the source of that) is a respiratory inhalation hazard and is only a hazard when working with it in a confined space. If you look at the NIOSH and OSHA data on it, you need to be exposed to very high dust concentrations in a confined space for long hours. Outdoor use doesn’t count. Glass media is amorphous silica and it is NOT an inhalation hazard.

There is no carcinogenic risk whatsoever in using glass media in a filter.
 
"Enhance Summer is the active catalytic oxidizer. You would not need to continue to use CYA with this product in the Pool. Titanium Dioxide and Polysilicates are the active ingredients. The product is non-toxic, non-corrosive and completely safe to use in a swimming pool. Considerably safer than chlorine actually"

That is the explanation I was given from a Dryden rep when I contacted them.

I may have been a bit quick to jump on them as VooDoo and obviously as others have stated Dryden does make a working system that is in use out of the country. I apologize as sometimes the view from my backyard soap box is not always as high as I would like it to be.

The primary health concern for silica dust and glass dust is breathing it un to the lungs and sinuses. Also obviously you don't want it in your eye, either your good one or your bad one. That's really only a concern when handling the product in its dry state.

With pool sand you dump it in the filter backwash it and rinse it and a large portion of the silica dust that was in it gets rinse out of the system.

With the Dryden product they recommend multiple layers of different sized material be added to the filter. From a filtering standpoint this makes great sense as density gradients in a filter are a wonderful way of improving filter efficiency. From a practical standpoint for the average residential pool filter this makes less sense over time. Every time you backflush the filter you forcefully sending water back up thru the sand bed in an effort to clean all the trapped material from the sand and to loosen and remix the sand bed. Ideally the whole sand bed will fluff up and release all of the trapped debris from the pool and exit out the waste hose. You will loose some of the sand from your filter in this process look in the site glass carefully and you will see bits of sand in there. The net effect for the Dryden glass media is that every time you backwash that layered bed of glass gets mixed up and all the fine particles of glass purposely made smaller than #20 sand can find their way to the laterals and head out into the pool. Overtime more and more of that fine material will end up going out the waste hose as well. As that material goes away so does the improved filtering of your media.

The TFP approach to this concept is less refined but no less effective. We add pool DE to our sand filters in small amounts. Granted pool DE has all the same inhalation risks if not more than the other two products when dry. The DE media is large enough to be trapped by the sand bed the same way as a DE filter uses the grids to hold the media. Granted you don't have the same single pass efficiency as a true DE filter or graduated density bed but residential pools aren't single pass systems. In the real world the pool water is going to pass thru that filter many times a day 7 days a week. In a commercial system where so much water is lost and there is such large volume to be filtered single pass efficiency is far more important but it comes with greatly increased cost.

When a sand filter with DE is back flushed the DE media is flushed out of the filter and goes to waste. This means if you need to add DE everytime you backwash which is a drawback though not a very big one. It takes me all of about 30sec to scope 1 cup of DE out of a bucket and put it in the skimmer after I backwash. From a cost standpoint it is very cheap. I think I spent $20 on a 20lb box of DE that should last me about 10 years. It also doesn't require me to get rid of the sand in my filter that is already paid for and will never wear out.
 
A couple additional points to consider.

The size of grade 1 Activate is manufactured under strict tolerances to achieve particle sizes of .4mm to 1.0mm
#20 grade silica sand is .45mm to .85mm typically
There is negligible risk in Activate passing through the laterals vs. #20 sand and if it does there's no more risk to the pool or bathers than if silica sand entered the pool.
The reason grade 2 activate is used up to the top of the laterals is to increase the fluidization of the entire bed during backwashing. Typically the media below the laterals sees less circulation. Dryden seeks to achieve extremely efficient backwash cycles.
Yes there is mixing during backwashing but it is minimal and a non-issue. The vertical expansion of the bed during backwashing is extremely uniform.

Does it cost more? Yes.
Does it provide superior long term filtration? Yes.
Does it require Deep Cleaning? No.
Can it decrease the time required to completely backwash thus saving water? Yes.

I suppose a pool owner that would choose to use Activate is the same pool owner that would choose to buy an M500 or S300i over an M200 or S200. Sometimes the law of diminishing returns is no matter for someone seeking the best. My hobby is home audio. Would you believe that there are over 15 manufacturers in that space that sell speakers in the $10,000 to $600,000 range? How about multiple manufacturers making record players costing well over $10,000? Talk about law of diminishing returns...

Oh, and yes, DE in a sand filter does increase the particle removal performance on the cheap. No argument there.
 
PoolguyinCT said:
I just looked at the Dryden system- I get the jist of & no desire to be negate or endorse somebody’s work/product. That’s science’s job.

What has my curiosity, is who is packaging ACO component?

The description has me thinking about a proprietary product called “summer shield.” I have always want to know what is in those SS, bottles. (I believe I’ve been close. I think it was the Fire reactivity & extinguishing that got me close.. then the trail went cold & I got busy (or vice versa)
Click to expand...

Summer Shield is not the same as Enhance Summer or ACO. I also don't know what it is made of and I sold large amounts of it while working for an industry distributor.

The Dryden product is shipped in bulk from Scotland to the US and is being packaged by a chemical packing company. I am not at liberty to divulge who it is.

Enhance Summer is interesting. If spilled on the skin the only side effect is that you will not get a tan in that area for 3-6 hours :D.
 
I am converting a S310S Hayward filter to the Activate glass Media. It would hold 500 lbs of sand. Chart on the side of the 25 lb bag says for a 500 Lb system, use 4 bags of coarse and 13 bags if fine. The 4 bags of coarse does not quite cover up the laterals. Should I use another half bag of coarse to cover them up before putting the 13 bags of fine on top?

? .
 
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