At last a hot tap that doesn’t need a special probe

In industrial facilities tanks are everywhere. Wastewater treatment uses equalization tanks, settling tanks, dissolved air flotation (DAF) tanks, retention tanks, you-name-it. Nearly all of them require pH measurements. Some also require ORP, conductivity or dissolved oxygen measurements as well.

Since all probes require periodic cleaning and maintenance, they have to be easily accessible. There are two ways to configure a probe so that it is. (Hint: Neither involve suspending the probe by the cable. This puts strain on the cable-probe connection and turns it into a pendulum.)

1. Attach the probe to the end of a submersion arm and lower the probe into the tank. A swing arm makes lowering and raising easy. The challenge is that you have to climb to the top of the tank to access the probe.
2. Insert the probe into the tank through a compression fitting. You can install it at any height. The challenge here is removing the probe without causing a minor flood.

AquaMetrix offers a submersion arm and a compression fitting. There is no low-cost solution to climbing to the top of the tank to access the submersion arm. But plugging the leak when removing a probe through a compression fitting is easy. It’s called a “hot tap” or “wet tap” and it’s not exactly new. Yet most of our users have never heard of it.

Hot taps are compression fittings with a valve. They are constructed so that the user pulls the probe out through a pipe and closes the valve. The result is a few drops of leaked tank content. They come in all shapes, sizes and costs. AquaMetrix traditionally made a probe, the P60C7, with a very long back end that could be inserted into a compact hot tap. The probe was relatively expensive, but the hot tap was inexpensive. If the hot tap is for keeps and the probe needs replacing wouldn’t it make more sense to make the hot tap more expensive and the probe less so? That was the thinking behind our new hot tap. The AM-HTA-R5, has a fitting that is best described as a “ram rod” for inserting an R5 series probe. It works with any 1” NPT probe. This includes our flagship fixed insertion probe, the R5 series (P60R5 6-wire pH, R60R5 6-wire ORP, P65R5 2-wire pH and R65R5 2-wire ORP). It also includes the 575 series combination pH or ORP probe and the AM-ODO optical dissolved oxygen probe.

The new hot tap that uses our flagship probe rather than a completely new one follows the strategy we’ve followed over the last few years: Simplify, simplify, simplify. The R5 series probe can also be configured to match the two disparate differential probes that were traditionally specialized, including the very popular variable insertion C6 series probe. This means our customers and distributors need buy only one probe and can then order accessories to convert a fixed insertion R5 probe into any of the other three varieties—variable insertion, hot tap and sanitary flange. The R5 probes also embody improvements, including a slimmer profile, hard-to-break electrode and a salt bridge that can be changed with just a screwdriver.

The new hot tap is the result of two years of engineering by our crackerjack engineer, Alex. He obsesses with every detail and we would get him counseling but his obsession is our gain.