good afternoon YouTube so when I installed my tankless water heater here I also added
one of these aqua pure water treatment filters scale inhibition systems as they call it it's a
cartridge that water just circulates in here and the water the leaves and goes down into the heater
is less likely to form scales installed it may of 2017 so I'm thinking it's probably time that I go
pull that off okay so I shut off the cold water the hot water line and the hot water output of
the water heater now I'm gonna go unscrew the filter and we'll take a look at that when I get
it down got the water draining out of the pipes there and yeah I think that cartridge definitely
did something there yeah there's definitely some sediment and built up around there so one thing
I want to do is green this thing out and then I want to cut it open and see what the inside
looks like I'll leave it draining in the sink and then I've got the new one here an AP 431 part of
the reason I want to look at what that one looks like inside is I'm not quite sure how long these
last so I was looking around in the box I must have missed these in the first one I installed
but they have this little sticker it's kind of a two-piece sticker this is just a sticker to go
on to the filter and then this is like a little chemical time indicator so it's got an adhesive
here it's got some chemicals in this little foil pouch and then supposedly it takes six to twelve
months for some sort of color change to happen and you're supposed to squeeze this so let's see what
happens here oh there there we go yeah squeezing the material down oh and there's your line makes
a little line at the bottom and you're supposed to put this on here like that and then I'll put
this on to the cartridge once I screw it in up there okay there we go put the sticker on also
mark the date up there and I'll go turn on the hot and cold up there oh there we go flush the
water out of there hot water yeah there's a little bit in the hot water line now I just have to get
another one of these ordered if you're using these filters you really need to shop around
because I find the price really varies quite a bit I'll see if I can find the lowest price on
these this time when I order it and I'll try to put a link to that in the video description you
can pay a little bit or a lot for the same filter ok so managed to cut this aqua pure
filter cannister open it's pretty thick plastic so inside they use a material that's called sila
Foss it's a milk thistle seed extract and so what it has it has both silicates and
phosphorus in it it's not a water softener like your traditional ion-exchange resin but it has
these little pellets maybe two or three millimeter diameter and the whole chamber is full there's a
tube in the middle and that too goes through the middle of the cartridge there it's very similar
to like an oil filter in your car it runs the water down into the pellets down here and then
this filter keeps the pellets down here let's the water go back and then the water comes out
the little holes around the outside so that's why you have to use their special tea fitting
let's the water go in the middle and then come out the outside so that way you only
need one connection right here to get the water to filter through so this has pretty high flow I
think they claim ten gallons per minute it's not a water softener the idea is phosphates and the
silicates that are in these little balls dissolve into the water at low concentrations like two to
three part per million those chemicals put a thin layer on your metallic pipes and prevent
the calcium and magnesium minerals that are in the water from attaching so it helps to reduce
scale buildup this doesn't soften the water the minerals are still in the water they just don't
precipitate out and form scale or lime deposits in your pipes or your fixtures so I have this before
the tankless water heater so all the water that goes through the heater is treated and then all
the water that goes to the showers the faucets the clothes washer the dishwasher also gets a
three treated water and this is a food-safe chemical so it's safe to drink although you
know don't use the hot water directly for drinking so this is actually supposed to be better for your
piping than a water softener it doesn't remove the hardness it just makes the hardness stay in
the water and not deposit out in your water heater or in your pipes so anyway that's what one looks
like after about two years worth of use various sources that I've found say replace these every
six months to one year this was after a little over two years of use so a lot of our water in
the area where I live is groundwater so you're gonna get some degree of hardness from that it's
not super hard but it's not soft and so I figure my two approaches one is I'm going to use one of
these cartridges for the tankless heater and then I'm gonna flush it every year with citric
acid descaler so I think between the two of those that should keep any calcium and lime deposits
from building up inside that would be the the main thing that would probably kill the water
heater is if you let the calcium and lime build up too much you know I won't know that these actually
do anything for maybe another 20 years so in 20 years if the water heater is still kicking
along these probably worked there seems to be some science behind these and it's not just a
snake-oil thing a lot of companies use these yeah and then here's the cartridge after I dumped out
the pellets that were in there so yeah you've got your filter disc up here at the top you can
see the tube runs down and this must be kind of a filter medium as well it looks like it's a porous
hard rigid foam it's pretty tough stuff so that probably is like a water filter and then your
water filters up through that up through all the beads and then this keeps all the beads in
the center chamber water comes out here and then that feeds these little holes around the outside
so yeah pretty neat little cartridge they have there I guess this is just so you could put a hex
socket on there or a wrench but you really don't need any tools to put these in you just screw
them in they have an o-ring right there that's your aqua pure ap 431 replacement cartridge for
the scale inhibition system and these are made by 3m they seem to be legitimate this seems to
be fairly widely recognized this polyphosphate that they use sila Foss so yeah that's what one
of those looks like inside so yeah if you have any other questions about that post up in the comment
section down below and I'll put links to some of the articles I found on these on this material
anyway you can check that out in the video description and as always thanks for watching