This is a question I should know, but how much water does a conventional haemo machine (eg not NXstage use). Based on a 4 hour dialysis session.
I’ve been told it’s around 100 litres per session. Couldn’t really find a lot of info.
The water issue is an extra plug for new minimal water usage & portable technology!
Cheers
JW
Depends upon the dialysate flow rate, and RO usage.
Dialysate flow rates can range widely, but usually only up to 800, 400 is the lowest I have seen most machines use. Also, depends upon the proportioning system. But a basic way of looking at it is this in a worst case scenario. An 800 flow rate would use .8 liters a minute. .8 x 60 = 48 liters an hour. 48 lph x 4 = 192 liters per treatment or about 49.5 gallons of water. ROs (reverse osmosis) for home can have a 50 - 75% recovery rate, meaning at 50%, every gallon of water made, took 2 gallons to make. So if the RO is at its worst… 50% recover, we take 192 (49.5) x 2 = 384 liters (99.1gallons) of water per treatment.
I know this is a long winded explanation, and it is the worst case of all involved.
Hope this helps.
I’ve asked the techs at my unit & they said around 150 litres per session.
Aaah well another item to plug for some new technology! I’ll be stuck with an oldstyle machine!
Hmmm Hi JW
My Freni uses around 600 litres for a 4 hour session, 500 dialysate flow rate and around 900+ litres for an 8 hour session, 300 dialysate flow rate. As Australia seems to always be in the grip of a drought I feel quite gulity about the amount of water I use, seems like the perfect reason to bring a machine like Nxstage down under.
If you use an R/O it pays to pipe the waste water from the R/O (but not from the dialysis machine) outside and use it for watering the garden, topping off a pool, etc. where it substitutes for fresh water you otherwise would use and hence is not wasted. It’s not hard to do as it is very low pressure.
Mel
Hmm that’s a thought, although not sure what the authorities would think about it.
I will certainly be bringing up the ‘aqua ethics’ & bonuses of having water saving dialysis machines when I attend the NKF conference later this year (the NKF conference UK, not to be confused, with similar in the USA). Fresenius have gone down a further notch with me. 600 litres! My god!
Hi there;
When we were on the Fresenius using a RO water system we were using quite a lot of water… Looked at past water bills it was between 450 and 475 gals per treatment (we were running nocturnal 7 hrs/6 days/wk TX’s)…
Like Mel suggested you can use the waste water from the RO to water your yard… I had mines drain into a tub and within the tub installed a sump pump that was used to pump water to my potted plants thru a drip irrigation system that I set up… Works great except during the winter months my back yard was a SWAMP… had a mosquito problem in the spring…
We tried to use a DI water system which uses a lot less water but had problems with LAL (Limus Amoebocyte Lysate) being too High… the endotoxin were too High… So we switched to a RO water system… This was when we first started Nightly Nocturnal Hemo Dialysis about 7 years ago…
The cost of the extra water is well worth it… You won’t regret it…See if you can get some kind of discount of MEDICAL use of the water…
HemoHelper