reverse osmosis water system

Reverse osmosis water systems are as wasteful as they are expensive. For every gallon of purified drinking water you get out of the tap you send 9 gallons down your sewer as waste water.

I use a Britta filter, $40 for the pitcher and ~$5 for a replacement cartridge.Brita Ultramax Water Dispensers: Larger Capacity Water Filters For The Family | Brita

Edit: The cartridges get replaced every 2 months

 

I've seen them at both Sam's club and Costco for under $200. We have one in that price range that we've had about 10 years and it works fine, you change the pre-filter and carbon filter about every 6 months, the RO element seems to last for life. It can put out about 3 gal. per day of filtered water so it's just used for drinking, coffee, tea, and ice cubes.
JSH is right about it using 10 gal of water for every gal of output, however in some areas, it's the only thing that will give you good drinking water. In our area, we have a HUGE iron content, we tried both the Brita and Pure filters and they basically do nothing to the water, they take a little of the bad taste away but make a pot of coffee, and you have a scum on top.
A distiller is another way to go, you don't have the waste water, but the down side here is electricity consumption and frequent cleaning, but it is a choice if you live in an area where water is at a premium.

 

This depends on your needs. Britta filters and other charcoal type filters remove bad tastes, but not minerals. If you really need to remove minerals then you need RO.

Personally I don't care much for Brita filters, or any other faucet or pitcher type filters. I use a good under sink charcoal filter which has a lot bigger capacity and lower cost of use. I only have to change our cartridge once every six to twelve months, and the filter size is standard, so you are not held captive by one company.

If you need a lot of RO water, consider a pumped system. These have a much larger capacity and avoid the water waste referred to above. They still have to do a little back flushing, but nothing like what is done with unpowered under sink RO units. A pumped unit will set you back a lot more than the cost of the Culligan unit.

If you need really pure water, put a deionizing filter stack downstream from an RO unit. I have one that works very well for laboratory water. If you go the deionizing route, you need special plumbing as deionized water will corrode metal faucetes and pipe.

Tom

 

When I lived in rural North Dakota I ran a distiller in winter, mostly on the coldest days. The "waste" heat from the distiller was 100% captured by the house, which reduced my heating fuel needs. During the coldest months of winter I distilled enough drinking water to last me all year.

Here in Spokane the only thing wrong with the water is the bad taste, and the Britta pitcher filter takes that all away. If I wait two months to change the filter there is a small but noticeable difference in the taste when I put a new one in, so I usually change it once a month if I remember. Not counting vacation time, of course.

I tried a Pur filter that goes on the faucet. It did not do as good a job as the Britta.

I drink a lot more water when it tastes good than I do when it does not. I looked at RO units, but cannot justify the cost.

 

Something I was always curious about with an RO system, why not recirculate the waste water?
Here's what I'm getting at, we go with a three tank system, tank one is filled from your water supply and not at pressure. Next we have a pump that transfers water from tank one to tank two, this would be a small (5 to 10 gal) pressure tank like you have on a domestic well, and of course a pressure switch to control the starting and stopping of the pump.
Now from tank two we have our RO filter hooked up, the good water of course goes to the output tank that came with the filter, but the waste line, rather than going down the drain, goes back to tank one to be reused.
OK now, there will obviously be a time when the water in tank one will have a buildup of the nasties we filtered out and need to be dumped so we can start over.
Anyone care to comment on the feasibility of such a system???

 

Why not use the waste water from the RO unit for toilet flushing? Pump into a small say 100 litre tank in the roof, the waste from RO fills this and gravity feeds toilet cisterns. any excess overflows to the sewer. At the quarter full level in the storage tank is a float valve that allows mains water to keep a minimum of 25 litres in the tank using mains water so toilets never run dry even if you switch to drinking beer rather than water.

 

A word of warning about both reverse osmosis and distilled water. These processes remove magnesium, causing cardiovascular problems if there is no other adequate source of magnesium. Water is hardly the only source, but it is just one more source that is being removed from the modern diet.

There are strong advocates and naysayers on the issue of water source magnesium. I don't claim to fully understand the science, but I am convinced that low magnesium is a health risk. It seems only prudent to add some magnesium back into the diet if you remove the water source.

 

RO reduces all minerals from water. This is not a plus for the flavor of drinking water or for your health. As for flavor, it's only a plus when you have really nasty tasting minerals. I find RO water to be flavorless. As the previous poster said, you lose a lot of good minerals by drinking RO water.

Tom

 

I wonder if you really lose "essential" minerals by using RO or distillation? We should be getting our essential nutrients from our foods, not depending on potable liquids eg beer

The water quality in most rural areas is enough to demand the use of some sort of water treatment eg water softener, iron filter, RO filter, etc. At the very least, the appliances like a dishwasher and hot water tank will last a lot longer than with "raw" water

 

With our water the porcelain in the tub will last longer too. Our water is so hard it might as well come out in chucks. We don't have grains of hardness, we have stones.

Tom

 

Nasty, water like that usually smells too

 

Oddly enough, ours is just good mineral water. People pay big bucks for this stuff. It tastes great and smells good, but it does have a lot of calcium. The Great Lakes are built on top of beds of limestone. All of our water is sitting down there in the lime, so there is plenty of calcium to go around.

The water just outside of the village is a crap shoot. Some places it is good, a few hundred yards over and it tastes like crap. You never know what you will get when drilling a well.

Speaking of city water, I did look it up and we pay about $200 a year for our city water. Now with the city sewer it will cost us $1800 a year to process that $200 worth of water. That doesn't seem right, especially since some of that water goes into the ground washing cars and watering trees.

Tom

 

I'm detecting a good side business here

So it sounds like your community doesn't draw lake water, but has a well system?

Aren't you forgetting the 50 G's amortized over 15 years? Highway robbery

 

Exactly. We have three wells. We used to do it with two wells, but when we raised the system pressure we needed another well for additional capacity.

Don't remind me.

Tom

 

A common problem in rural Manitoba communities is when they do additional wells, they have to go a lot deeper to get the volume they need. Almost inevitable the resulting water is high in iron and really nasty stuff.

Some of those communities have to resort to using expensive membrane systems at the water treatment plant. It's that, or whenever a person waters the lawn, their white stucco turns red from the water

Sorry to get you fired up over the sewer issue. If I were you, I'd move. I can only imagine what else is coming down the pike