That’s a great idea. I can’t believe it never occurred to me to circulate it.
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I use quats for yearly spraying of roofs to maintain the clean look, less enviro concerns for homes built over the water & a healthy yearly charge per unit.
You don’t use google ?
That’s what I always do too. Just recirculate it for a while. My aodd pump is also used to transfer sh to other containers at times, so I like to make sure the pure sh is out of my lines and the roof mix is flowing through it good before spraying.
UM…what kind of quat are you using? The majority are super bad for fish, as in the bottle says don’t allow this to release to a waterway, bad.
There are products that are rated for direct release into the environment…I’ve developed a few over the years. Basically we can’t use Glycol Ether EB (a.k.a. butyl), we have to use it’s cousin DPM. It does about 80% as good of a job, but it’s eco friendly. Many of the surfactants us chemists use today are the eco kind.
Little tip, the worst surfactants are NPE (nonylphenol ethoxylates) and Walmart, of all places, banned the use in ALL of their products. So if you are getting a surfactant or cleaner from there it doesn’t have any NPE’s in it. NPE’s have been banned in Europe for years, but many companies still use them in their formulas.
No. It sounds like a made up word. I use Bing and yahoo
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A biologist with the water management district dictated Quat[s] over SH for preventative treatments on state & federal properties built on pilings in my district.
As a chemist with a degree in marine science…I’m looking at my choices being SH or Quats to be dumped in the water and I’m like
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It was due to odor of bleach & fading
Having a background in the restaurant industry, they have categorically moved away from any chlorine santizers and gone to strictly quat based sanitizer. I was always told, that quat was generally safer and less likely to create toxicity. My response was “Huh?” I get concentrated quat and have to dilute it to a safe working solution (200 ppm) just like chlorine (50-100ppm). I can just as easily screw up quat as I can chlorine. Any real science behind why the industry migrating from chlorine to quat?
Public perception ?
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Nah. They have no clue what we used and never asked.
Yes, quats destroy biologicals. Mold, mildew, bacteria…if it’s alive it goes for it. Bleach doesn’t descriminate. It goes after EVERYTHING…biologicals, cloths/sponges, clothes…and it smells.
Bleach is aggressive, plain and simple. Quats are only aggressive against biologicals.
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Your response intrigues me then.
When a lot of what we are killing is biologicals as you mention being mold, mildew, etc, would quat be a better choice?
I have never thought to try quat, so I have no idea.
There are house “washes” on the market that are quat based. You spray them on the house and the house becomes magically “cleaner” as time moves on. You spray and forget is the tag line. The house doesn’t appear clean at first, so I don’t think it’s for everyone.
Here is the downside. It’s common knowledge that bleach degrades into salt and water. Quats don’t degrade like that. They stay and they kill and they kill and they kill. It says right on those products NOT to let it go into the sewer or into a waterway…so how the heck is it a housewash was always my question. These products are EPA registered pesticides AS housewashes, how are they not going to get washed down a drain or into a waterway?
Blows my mind.
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This sounds really interesting, would you mind making a post under roof cleaning with more details? Like where to buy and how to mix and apply
I believe quats is the main ingredient in things like spray and forget.
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I did a bit ok research a while back on quats and I got the impression that it degrades quickly, I also ordered some quat and trialed it and was unhappy with results which I monitored for several months.
I was unsure whether the almost non existent visual results were due to my batch having degraded substantially before I recieved it or that it had worked and the matter had been killed but just not bleached clean?
I toyed with the idea of doing an agar plate to see if it was alive ?
Is this a suitable test method or maybe you could advise me on something else I could try.
Quats are expensive compared to SH & we only use when mandated, per specific guidelines. Quat will not clean a dirty black roof in minutes like SH, mold is in the same class as germs quat needs to be applied @ over 500ppm & greater. In my opinion quat is good for prevention due to maintaining a residual effect where SH will not but is in no way a replacement for SH in our field,
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Its the green movement & public ignorance that push change
