“Americans today enjoy the luxury of traveling from city to city and state to state with the assurance that the water they use fro drinking, bathing or recreation is free from harmful organisms.  This assurance is due to the diligence of the personnel within the water supply facilities whose job it is to protect the public water systems.  History tells us, however, that this is not always been true.”

Once a year you should receive a letter from Hillsborough County reminding you that it is time to have your Backflow Prevention Assembly inspected.  The inspection process is quick and affordable and staying in compliance with the County requirements is easy.   Still many of our customers do not really know what a Backflow Prevention Assembly is, what it does or why it must be tested. This article is intended to answer all of those questions.

“Backflow refers to the flow of any foreign liquids gasses or substances into the potable water supply distribution pipe lines.”  There are many ways that this can happen, some of them as common as watering your lawn.  Consider these examples of how a backflow contamination can occur with you garden hose:

“It may be used with a sprayer attachment for spraying various chemicals on lawns and shrubs.

The hose may be left submerged in a bucket, swimming pool or hot tub

The hose may simply be left laying on the ground which may be contaminated with fertilizer or other garden chemicals”

“In any of these situations, if a pressure drop occurs in the potable water system, contaminants may be drawn back into the water lines providing a potentially hazardous situation.” This is why the county requires Backflow Prevention Assemblies to be installed, maintained and inspected regularly. The guidelines that govern our own county ordinances stem from both The Safe Drinking Water Act (1974) and the Environmental Protection Agency.  These regulations require of each private citizen a certain level of commitment so that we all share in the responsibility to protect the drinkable water supply.

When you call out one of our certified Backflow Tester Technicians to test your assembly, they will use specialized equipment to create a cycle in your backflow unit. During this cycle, the technician will ensure that the unit’s check valves close at a given set of pressure and that its atmospheric valves open at the proper time and pressure.  The equipment that we use is certified yearly and our technicians are re-certified every two years. 

As we can not survive without fresh, clean water, the standards by which we protect our store of it must be of the highest quality.  We take our role in that system very seriously.

For more information about Backflow Prevention, check out our article The Peace of Mind Valve from the October issue of Solutions & Insights.

*The sections of this article in quotes were written by Dr. Barbara Mitchell of Mitchell Training, Inc. and were originally published in the training manual Backflow Prevention Assembly Testing and Repair Workbook. All quoted material was used with permission.