Since 2003, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has recommended dental practices install self-contained water bottle systems combined with chemical treatment and routine monitoring of dental unit waterlines.
Why? Because bottles give you control.
Self-contained water bottles give you power over your waterline environments. With these independent systems, you’re able to effectively and efficiently introduce both shock treatments and low-level antimicrobial maintenance treatments to effectively keep your water below the CDC’s ≤500 CFU/mL standard. What if you don’t have water bottles? While there are in-line low-level antimicrobial treatment solutions that can be installed plumbed to municipal water, these alone do not over time and consistently win the battle against bacteria and do not provide an easy access point to initiate a shock treatment. Shock treatments are a necessary part of every effective waterline treatment protocol and the only practical way to shock your waterlines is with water bottle systems.
As Don Cheney, a former Patterson Dental Service Technician of 30 years wrote in his article Self-Contained Water
Bottles for Dental Economics, “There is no better way to have control of dental unit water lines than with the use of
water bottles on the dental unit.”
Today, dental unit manufacturers have water bottles as standard for their equipment. If your practice has older units, these can be retrofitted by your dental service technicians for a couple of hundred dollars plus the cost of the technician’s time. They can be configured to supply water to each device, including the a/w syringe, handpieces, and scalers.