Resin and Vessels

It depends on your water hardness and how much water you put through it. Resin exhausts by capturing dissolved minerals, so a bag that lasts months in a soft water area can be gone in weeks if hard tap water runs straight through it. Most window cleaners in hard water areas put an RO membrane in front of the vessel and let the resin polish off the last few ppm, which stretches each bag a long way. A TDS meter reading of your tap water tells you which side of that line you are on.

This collection has three: FaceLift, Unger and Tulsion MB115, each in a 25 litre bag. All three are virgin mixed bed ion exchange resin, so the choice comes down to price per bag and brand preference rather than the chemistry.

Tulsion MB115 is a virgin mixed bed deionising resin, supplied here in a 25 litre bag. Mixed bed means the cation and anion beads come ready blended, so the bag pours straight into a DI vessel or cartridge with no mixing. Window cleaners use it to bring water down to 0 ppm, either straight from the tap in soft water areas or as the polishing stage after an RO membrane.

Yes. The DI Resin Vessels come in 11L and 25L sizes, and there are distribution systems to fit 6.8L, 11L and 25L vessels if you are refurbishing one you already own. Any of the 25 litre resin bags in this collection will fill either vessel size, and a funnel makes the swap a much cleaner job.

Resin funnels, vessel holders in 4, 6 and 8 inch sizes, Hozelock male to 3/4 inch threaded connectors in plastic and brass, refillable 10 and 20 inch cartridges, and distribution systems for 6.8L, 11L and 25L vessels. If you only buy one, make it the Blue Resin Funnel: pouring 25 litres of beads into a vessel neck without a funnel rarely ends well.

Test the water coming out of the vessel with a TDS meter. Fresh resin brings the reading down to 0 ppm, and once it starts creeping up the resin is exhausting and spotting risk returns. Some resins also change colour as they exhaust, but treat that as a rough guide rather than the check: the meter is the reliable answer.

Yes. Mixed bed resin is not brand locked, so any of the 25 litre bags here will refill a standard DI vessel or refillable cartridge, whatever system it feeds. The exception is the Unger HydroPower range, which takes its own resin packs and bags, and those are in this collection too.

Not in practice. Regenerating exhausted mixed bed resin means separating the bead types and treating them with strong chemicals, which is industrial plant work rather than something to do in a garage. Once the TDS reading climbs, swap in fresh resin. If you run 10 or 20 inch housings, the Refillable Resin Cartridge is the reusable part: keep the shell and replace only the beads inside.

Unscrew the vessel head, tip out the spent beads and pour the new resin in through a funnel, then leave a little space at the top rather than packing the vessel to the brim. Refit the head, reconnect the water and run it through briefly before you check the output on a TDS meter. A funnel sized for vessel necks is the difference between a clean swap and beads everywhere.