kengr

This is why the better run *non*-government organizations have clauses in the contract that state that if things aren't to spec, the contractor has to fix them at his own expense (and with penalties for the time it takes)

At that company I worked for, the plumbing contractor had to do that. Seems they'd ignored the *explicit* instruction that they were to use some special stuff (teflon tape? something else?) to seal the joints in the DI water lines.

Instead they used regular "pipe dope" or some such. So the hyper pure water was contaminated and messed stuff up.

Even better, the lines run *thru* the concrete floor slabs. So to fix them they had to snake "liners" thru them.

Many years later they had a *different* problem with the DI lines. Since they couldn't be chlorinated, they developed bacterial colonies. Which caused stains on the silicon wafers (they went *nuts* trying to figure out what was causing the stains until somebody noticed that in cleaning the hoses for the lapping machines this "sludge" came out (bacterial mats).

That led to having to shut down stuff one day and flush the lines with 20% (or was it 40%?) hydrogen peroxide. Nasty stuff, but since it breaks down to water and oxygen (and converted the organics to things like water, CO2 and nitrogen) it did the job without contaminating things.

I don't know what the long term solution was, but me, I'd have bought an ozonator like some places use for water purification, and treated the DI water with that.