By André Opperman, Managing Director, Rolfes Water
I’ve watched too many operations teams discover water quality problems only after equipment starts failing or energy bills spike unexpectedly. The frustrating part is that in almost every case, the warning signs were there weeks or even months earlier. Small changes in conductivity here, a gradual pH shift there. Nothing dramatic enough to trigger alarms, but significant enough to set costly consequences in motion.
This is water quality drift, and it’s one of the most underestimated risks in industrial water management. It refers to gradual, often unnoticed changes in the characteristics of processed water or wastewater. A slight increase in conductivity, a small shift in pH, a modest rise in hardness or a creeping change in microbial activity may all seem harmless when viewed in isolation. In reality, these small variations influence every stage of production and place immense pressure on systems that depend on stable water conditions.
After years of working with facilities across Africa, I’ve learned that the real challenge isn’t dramatic system failures. It’s the slow, quiet degradation that nobody notices until it becomes expensive to fix. In this article, I’ll walk through what causes water quality drift, how it impacts industrial operations and why catching it early prevents significant cost exposure for businesses operating in our challenging African environment.
What Water Quality Drift Really Means
Water quality is never truly static. Every industrial process exposes water to heat, chemicals, physical stress, environmental conditions and mechanical demands. Even municipal supply water changes character throughout the year, sometimes dramatically. When these influences cause a deviation from the desired specifications, the system begins to behave differently. Not always in obvious ways, but differently nonetheless.
Drift can occur anywhere in your water systems:
- Cooling circuits
- Boiler feed water systems
- Effluent treatment plants
- Clarification units
- Potable water systems within industrial sites
The problem is that most changes develop slowly. They escape notice until they trigger performance loss, asset damage or non-compliance with discharge requirements. I’ve seen facilities operate for months with gradually deteriorating water quality, completely unaware that their cooling efficiency has dropped by 15% or that their boiler is steadily accumulating scale.
Water quality rarely shifts dramatically overnight. Instead, it moves step by step, parameter by parameter, until the accumulated change becomes expensive to correct. By the time most operations teams recognise the problem, they’re already dealing with consequences rather than preventing them.
Common Causes of Water Quality Drift
Understanding where drift comes from helps explain why it’s so persistent across different industries and regions. The causes are rarely exotic. They’re typically straightforward factors that compound over time.
1. Seasonal Temperature Changes
Summer in Africa brings more than just heat. Warmer conditions promote microbial growth, accelerate evaporation and raise the concentration of dissolved solids in cooling systems. This places additional pressure on chemical treatment programmes and interferes with corrosion and scale control. What worked perfectly well in winter suddenly struggles to maintain the same level of protection. I’ve seen cooling tower programmes that performed flawlessly for eight months fail within weeks once temperatures climbed above 35°C.
2. Inconsistent Municipal Supply
Many regions across the continent experience supply interruptions or variations in municipal water composition. One week the water arrives with moderate hardness, the next week it’s significantly higher. These sudden changes in hardness, alkalinity or turbidity quickly influence industrial processes that were calibrated for consistent input water. For facilities relying on municipal supply as their primary source, this variability creates a moving target that’s difficult to hit consistently.
3. Load Shedding or Power Instability
This is a uniquely challenging issue in our operating environment. Interrupted circulation, unplanned stoppages and fluctuating pump speeds disturb treatment routines in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. When dosing systems pause unexpectedly during load shedding, water quality can drift within hours. Biological processes in effluent treatment are particularly vulnerable. Once disrupted, they can take days to re-establish stable performance.
4. Ageing Infrastructure
Pipes, tanks and heat exchange equipment don’t improve with age. As they deteriorate, they introduce impurities that weren’t part of the original system design. Corrosion products, biofilm accumulation and deposit formation alter system behaviour and drive treatment demand steadily upward. I’ve worked with facilities where internal corrosion was contributing more contamination to the water than the actual process itself. The treatment programme was essentially fighting the infrastructure rather than supporting the operation.
5. Chemical Underdosing or Overdosing
Even slight chemical imbalance can shift pH, influence coagulation or impair biological processes in effluent treatment. The challenge is that dosing accuracy tends to degrade gradually. Pumps wear, calibration drifts, injection points become partially blocked. Inaccurate dosing accumulates over time and eventually changes the full character of the water. What started as a minor calibration issue becomes a systemic water quality problem that affects multiple processes downstream.
How Quality Drift Affects Industrial Operations
The impact of quality drift extends far beyond water chemistry. It touches operational stability, equipment longevity, energy consumption and regulatory compliance. While the initial changes may appear small on laboratory reports, the operational and financial consequences can be substantial.
1. Reduced Heat Exchange Efficiency
Cooling towers and heat exchangers are particularly sensitive to changes in conductivity, hardness and microbial presence. A small increase in scale-forming minerals reduces heat transfer capacity. It happens gradually, so operators often don’t connect declining efficiency with changing water quality. As heat exchange efficiency drops, energy consumption rises and production throughput may suffer. In some cases, facilities compensate by running equipment harder or longer, which accelerates wear and increases operating costs without addressing the underlying water quality issue.
2. Accelerated Corrosion
A shift in pH or dissolved oxygen content speeds up corrosion inside boilers, pipelines and cooling circuits. Corrosion doesn’t just damage assets. It also releases corrosion products into the water, further complicating treatment and creating a feedback loop that’s difficult to break. I’ve seen boiler tubes that should have lasted ten years fail in three because gradual pH drift went unnoticed. The replacement cost was significant, but the production downtime was even more expensive.
3. Unstable Boiler Performance
Boiler feed water demands precise control. There’s very little tolerance for deviation. Even modest increases in hardness or alkalinity encourage scale formation or foaming. Minor drift translates directly into significant fuel loss and potential safety risks. Boiler efficiency is heavily dependent on water quality consistency, and drift undermines that consistency in ways that aren’t always immediately visible. The first sign is often increased fuel consumption or unexplained steam quality issues.
4. Inconsistent Product Quality
For food, beverage, pharmaceutical and chemical production, water quality forms part of the product itself. It’s not just a utility, it’s an ingredient. Variations in water chemistry have the potential to alter taste, colour, stability and uniformity. In quality-critical industries, water quality drift can lead to batch rejections, customer complaints or regulatory non-conformances. The cost isn’t just in wasted materials but also in damaged reputation and lost customer confidence.
5. Compliance Risks for Effluent Discharge
Wastewater treatment relies on predictable conditions. The biological, chemical and physical processes that remove contaminants all function within specific parameter ranges. Changes in influent composition undermine chemical reactions, settling efficiency, biological activity and final discharge quality. A drift of only a few points in key parameters may place a facility out of compliance with environmental discharge limits. The regulatory and financial consequences of non-compliance can be severe, particularly in industries under close environmental scrutiny.
6. Increased Chemical Consumption
When water moves off spec, treatment programmes become less efficient. Plants typically respond by increasing chemical dosing to maintain apparent performance. This approach conceals the symptom but doesn’t correct the underlying cause. Costs rise steadily whilst the long-term issues remain unaddressed. I’ve encountered facilities spending 30% more on treatment chemicals than necessary, simply because they were compensating for undiagnosed water quality drift rather than correcting it.
Why Water Quality Drift Often Goes Unnoticed
Most facilities conduct routine monitoring and review laboratory reports regularly. Despite this, drift frequently slips through the cracks. Understanding why helps explain how to prevent it.
1. Gradual Change Appears Normal
Operators become accustomed to small fluctuations over time. When parameters shift gradually, each individual change seems minor and within acceptable bounds. Since the system continues running, the shift may seem unimportant, even when it indicates emerging problems. Human psychology works against us here. We normalise incremental change and lose sight of how far conditions have drifted from the original baseline.
2. Limited Real-Time Data
Many plants still rely on periodic grab samples and laboratory analysis. Without continuous monitoring, it becomes difficult to connect process disruptions with subtle water chemistry changes. The sampling frequency may be weekly or even monthly, which means drift can advance significantly between data points. By the time the trend becomes clear in the data, the operational impact is already underway.
3. Seasonal or Operational Pressure
During busy periods, shutdown preparation or increased production demand, attention naturally shifts towards immediate operational tasks rather than subtle analytical variations. Water quality monitoring can become a lower priority when production targets are tight or staffing is stretched. This is precisely when drift is most likely to accelerate, because the systems are under greatest stress. The result is a slow accumulation of risk that becomes visible only when equipment performance drops noticeably, energy costs spike or compliance limits are exceeded.
How Early Detection Prevents Costly Outcomes
Addressing water quality drift before it affects equipment or compliance delivers significant financial and operational advantages. The earlier you intervene, the simpler and less expensive the correction becomes.
Early correction restores the balance of chemical reactions, reduces stress on treatment units and maintains predictable performance across all water-dependent processes. System stability improves, which makes operations more manageable and reduces the frequency of unexpected interventions.
Reducing corrosion, scale accumulation and microbial growth protects boilers, cooling towers, pipelines and heat exchangers from long-term damage. Asset life extension is one of the most valuable but least visible benefits of proactive water quality management. Equipment that should last fifteen years can fail in eight if water quality drifts unchecked. Conversely, well-maintained water quality can extend asset life beyond design expectations.
Stable water conditions reduce energy consumption and chemical demand. These improvements often produce measurable cost savings within a few months of correcting drift. The return on investment for improved monitoring and treatment control is typically rapid, particularly in energy-intensive operations where heat exchange efficiency directly affects fuel or electricity costs.
Predictable effluent quality supports safer discharge, demonstrates responsible water management and strengthens alignment with sustainability targets. For facilities operating under discharge permits or environmental management plans, preventing drift is essential to maintaining compliance and avoiding regulatory action.
Preventing drift stops small deviations from turning into equipment failures or emergency interventions. Unplanned downtime is expensive not just in lost production but also in emergency repairs, rush deliveries of parts and the disruption to planned maintenance schedules. Early detection allows for planned, controlled corrections rather than reactive crisis management.
What Facilities Can Do to Manage Quality Drift
Managing drift effectively requires a combination of better monitoring, proper equipment maintenance and proactive operational adjustments. None of these measures are particularly complex, but they do require commitment and consistency.
1. Monitor Key Parameters More Frequently
Conductivity, pH, alkalinity, microbial counts, hardness and turbidity provide early warning signals when tracked consistently. Regular monitoring reveals patterns and trends long before they become operationally significant. The investment in more frequent testing or continuous monitoring equipment typically pays for itself through earlier problem detection and reduced treatment costs. Don’t wait for monthly laboratory reports to show you a problem that’s been developing for weeks.
2. Review Dosing Equipment Performance
Blockages, pump wear and inconsistent feed rates are common causes of treatment drift. Routine calibration and maintenance ensure that chemical addition remains stable and accurate. I recommend checking dosing equipment performance at least monthly, and more frequently in critical applications. Dosing accuracy is fundamental to water quality control. If your dosing isn’t accurate, your chemistry won’t be either, regardless of how good your treatment programme is on paper.
3. Conduct Trend Analysis Instead of One-Point Checks
Single data points tell you where you are today. Trend analysis tells you where you’re going. Plotting data over time allows operations teams to identify subtle patterns that wouldn’t be visible in isolated test results. A slight upward movement in conductivity or hardness becomes apparent when viewed as a series rather than as individual measurements. Trend analysis transforms data from a reporting exercise into a predictive tool.
4. Strengthen Seasonal Preparedness
Summer and high-demand periods require proactive adjustments to cooling and boiler programmes. Anticipating seasonal drift is far more effective than correcting it after the fact. Review your treatment programmes before conditions change, not after performance starts declining. Prepare for temperature increases, evaporation rates and microbial challenges before they arrive. Reactive water treatment is always more expensive than proactive management.
5. Assess Infrastructure Condition
Ageing systems contribute significantly to water quality drift. Regular inspections of pipes, heat exchangers, storage tanks and distribution systems provide valuable insight into hidden contributors to water quality problems. Corrosion, deposits and biofilm growth inside equipment often drive treatment demand far higher than it should be. Sometimes the most effective water quality improvement comes from repairing or replacing deteriorated infrastructure rather than intensifying chemical treatment.
The Importance of Technical Partnership
Managing water quality drift is not solely a chemical challenge. It requires process understanding, accurate data interpretation, on-site technical insight and experience across multiple industries and operating conditions. Many industrial facilities benefit from working with trusted technical partners who help trace root causes, establish stable control strategies and identify the earliest signs of change before they become expensive problems.
In Africa, where water scarcity, municipal supply variability and operational challenges like load shedding are part of the daily operating reality, consistent water quality becomes a genuine competitive advantage. Facilities that maintain stable water conditions operate more efficiently, spend less on energy and chemicals, experience less unplanned downtime and maintain better regulatory compliance. Stability supports efficiency. Efficiency supports long-term operational resilience and profitability.
Water quality drift may begin quietly and gradually, but its influence reaches deep into plant performance and operating costs. With the right monitoring approach, proper equipment maintenance and timely intervention, industries can protect assets, reduce operating expenses and maintain dependable production, even during periods of operational stress or challenging external conditions. The key is recognising that small changes matter, and that addressing them early is always easier and less expensive than correcting them after the damage is done.
