Getting rid of scale and algae in a fountain and saving a lot of effort to do the cleaning

Company: City of Berlin, Germany

In water fountains there are high amounts of water evaporating. This water has to be replaced either by drinking water or water from a bore well. Depending on the design of the fountain, there could be along the evaporating line or over the whole fountain found a lot of scale formed, which gives an ugly appearance. In addition it is very common, to find in such fountains a lot of algae. Despite the addition of chemicals to the water, the cleaning of the fountain was hard and time consuming. High pressure cleaners and strong chemicals have to be used, in order to get the fountain clean again. Especially in older fountains with artwork, the cleaning was very expensive, with a total cost of several 1.000 EUR per year.

Depending the size and the complexity of the fountain, one or several special for this purpose developed so called Merus Bio Rings, have been installed in the circulation pipe of the fountain. At the same time the adding of any chemicals, against scaling or algae was stopped.

Depending on the design of the fountain, the results could be seen very soon. One fountain, containing three shells, the water falls from one level to the next, it could be seen daily how the scale was removed from the red granite by itself. All surfaces where there is a constant flow of water have got clean again without any means of cleaning. Depending of the location of the fountain, a lot of biomass from outside (pollen) is brought in the water, these accelerate the growing of the algae. The new growing of algae could therefore not totally be stopped, but the few algae are only lasting a few days, get brown and fall to the bottom of the fountain. The effect could be seen best during the cleaning of the fountains.

Most of the scale and algae has been flushed out during the draining of the fountain or just with the help of some water from a hose. The required time for cleaning such a fountain is now less than half as it was  before. The costs for the chemicals, the logisitcs of supplying the chemicals to the fountains and the technical service of the dosing systems could be saved total.