The treatment plant and reservoir at Palmdale, California always strives to maximize water quality. Part of the challenge was blue-green algae that choked the reservoir all summer, giving the water bad taste and odor. 

At first, Greg Dluzak coped by dumping up to 2000 pounds of copper sulfate into the lake each week. But chemicals are costly, and they’ll cause environmental problems down the road. Always open to innovative solutions, Palmdale installed seven SolarBee® water circulators on the reservoir, and three more in the storage tanks. SolarBee’s near-laminar flow worked wonders. 

“Those algae blooms were virtually eliminated and chemical treatments reduced to a minimum,” reported Dluzak. In fact, the lake’s water clarity doubled. Also, SolarBee balanced the water temperature and improved the catch rate for sport fishermen. In the storage tanks, SolarBee’s thorough mixing keeps temperature stratification and stagnation to a minimum, thus providing good chlorine residual and reducing the risk of disinfection byproducts.