Why NO Citric Acid anymore?
If you already have the citric acid in your electrolyzer, just leave it. It’s obviously working OK.
Next cleaning (maintenance rinse), switch to pure lye.
The two ‘problems’ are:
1. That not all citric acid is ‘pure’. MANY of the samples also contain oils that cause foaming in the electrolyzer.
Foaming causes rapid lye loss as the foam rides out of the machine with the gas.
This also puts lye into the filter and humidifier water… Not Good.
2. Other impurities in some citric acid reacts with the lye (NaOH) to form excessive sludge (a soapy waxy substance), plugging up the machine and/or requiring excessively short times between maintenance rinses.
These things did not happen with the citric acid that we used for our testing in the lab. So we had no idea that these impurities existed or what they’d do.
We originally recommended citric acid because it had some complementary benefits.
1. it tended to mitigate the caustic of the lye.
2. it helps keep the machine clean inside.
3. it tended to REDUCE foaming.
Citric Acid is NOT an efficient electrolyte and does nothing to increase the efficiency of generating the gas. It’s uses were complementary.
The lye is not that caustic, it stays in the machine and it IS a soap so it pretty much keeps the inside of the machine clean anyway.
We recommended citric acid as an OPTIONAL addition from the start of the AquaCure and now we (embarrassingly) withdrawal that recommendation because the ‘side effects’ of the ubiquitous impurities are too great.
There’s no way to guarantee that the citric acid will be pure enough to be used (quality control is all over the place) and it wasn’t enough of an advantage to try to find guaranteed pure sources.
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