Why Your pH Reading Keeps Drifting: The Reference Electrode Problem Nobody Talks About
Every time a pH reading drifts, the glass bulb gets blamed. The operator recalibrates, the drift comes back within days, and eventually someone replaces the whole sensor. Nine times out of ten, the glass electrode was never the problem — a pattern we see repeatedly across process plants in Malaysia. The reference electrode is. Across […]
Hydrofluoric Acid and Standard pH Sensors: Why Glass Electrodes Fail and What to Use Instead
Put a standard glass pH electrode into a hydrofluoric acid stream and you are on a countdown. It might read fine for a few days. Then the slope drops, the response slows, and eventually the bulb itself starts to look etched or frosted. By the time someone pulls the sensor for inspection, the glass is […]
Why 90% of pH Sensor Failures Come from the Reference Cell — and How the LECOL B65 Fixes This
The glass membrane of a pH sensor rarely fails. Under normal operating conditions, a good pH glass membrane will last 2–5 years before its sensitivity degrades below useful limits. The reference cell, on the other hand, fails constantly — and in contaminated, hard, or chemically aggressive water, it fails quickly. Industry data on pH sensor […]
Why Standard pH Sensors Fail in Ultrapure Water — and What the LECOL B64 Does Differently
A standard pH sensor placed in ultrapure water does not measure the pH of the water. It measures a drifting, unstable number that is influenced by the sensor’s own reference cell leaching ions into the sample, by CO₂ absorption at the liquid junction, and by the extremely low ionic strength of the water itself. The […]
How to Measure Bacteria in Metalcutting Coolant — and When to Act
A metalcutting coolant that smells like rotten eggs on Monday morning is already in serious trouble. The hydrogen sulphide odour is produced by anaerobic bacteria that have been multiplying in the sump over the weekend, without agitation, in the absence of oxygen. By the time the smell is obvious, bacterial counts are in the billions […]
What Happens When You Run a Boiler Monitoring System Without a Sample Cooler
Every boiler feedwater and steam condensate analyser on the market — including the Pyxis Guardian IK-2000 series — specifies that it must be installed downstream of a sample cooler. This requirement is stated prominently in the installation documentation, with operating temperature limits of 40–49°C at the sensor inlet. In practice, sample coolers are frequently omitted […]
Why Cation Conductivity Tells You More Than Standard Conductivity in a Boiler System
Standard conductivity measurement is one of the most common parameters in boiler feedwater and steam condensate monitoring. It is fast, inexpensive, and gives a useful general indication of total dissolved solids. But in power generation and co-generation applications, standard conductivity has a significant limitation: it cannot reliably distinguish between contaminants that are genuinely corrosive and […]
The Consequences of Running a Cooling Tower Above Its Maximum Cycles of Concentration
Cycles of concentration is one of the most important parameters in cooling tower operation. It determines how much mineral content builds up in the circulating water relative to the makeup water, and it directly controls both water consumption and the risk of scale and corrosion. Most operators know they should monitor it. Far fewer understand […]
Why Conductivity Alone Is Not Enough to Control a Cooling Tower
Conductivity control is the foundation of every cooling tower water treatment programme. It keeps dissolved solids from concentrating to the point of scale formation, and it triggers the bleed-and-dose cycle that maintains chemical treatment levels. It is necessary. It is also not sufficient. A cooling tower controlled only by conductivity is a system that manages […]
Why Real-Time Boiler Water Quality Monitoring Is Not Optional — Conductivity, pH, Dissolved Oxygen, and Hardness Explained
A boiler that runs on poor-quality feedwater does not announce the problem immediately. The damage accumulates quietly — inside heat transfer surfaces, in the steam distribution system, at turbine blades — until it manifests as a tube failure, a forced shutdown, or an efficiency decline that has been building for months. The four parameters that […]