The truth about residential Reverse Osmosis Systems

Let’s face it; in this day and age everybody is concerned about the quality of water we have at our home. Residential reverse osmosis systems are one of the options that people choose to install at their home.

When I was in the process of selecting a water purification system for my own house, I did my own research on residential reverse osmosis systems. In this article, I will give you below my top three reasons why I should advise you against buying them. I start with the least and finish with the most important.

Reason #1: They take a long time to process water. This downside is directly related with the way they operate: High pressure water is forced through a membrane with very small pores in it. In this way, the water, which consists of relatively small molecules, gets to be separated from pollutants which have larger molecules. Water passes through to the other side of this membrane, while the rest is accumulated before it. As you realize, due to the minute size of the membrane pores, it takes a long time for water to pass through.

Just to give you a rough indication, in order for one gallon of pure water to be produced, it may take up to three hours. As a consequence of this drawback, installation of residential reverse osmosis systems always requires for a storage tank with capacity 2 to 5 gallons of water.

As you understand, that extra storage tank will be taken into account when you estimate the space allocated at your home for the installation of the system. In addition, you should carefully dimension the capacity of this tank, in order to make sure that it will meet your maximum demand of water on a day to day basis.

Reason #2: To make matters worse, most RO units waste a lot of water. Just to give you an indication, they typically use between 3 to 10 gallons of tap water to produce 1 gallon of purified water; the remainder drains away.

This means that your ongoing cost per gallon of water produces goes up, due to higher consumption of tap water. Also, your installation set up should be more complicated, in order to take care of the drained water.

Reason #3: And we come to the biggest downside of all, at least in my book. Because of the way that residential reverse osmosis systems work, the minerals (calcium, potassium, magnesium etc) which are existent in tap water are discarded, because they have larger molecules than water and so do not pass the membrane.

It is worth mentioning that demineralized water is not very appealing to your taste buds. It is flat and tasteless.

But, unfortunately, the drawbacks of drinking demineralized water do not end on just the taste alone. Long time consumption of it can really endanger your health, as experts say. In fact, in their report that was published some time ago and was based on results of a detailed study, the World Health Organization claim that, in order to avoid any health problems, people should never consume water that does not contain minimum levels of essential minerals.

Having said the above, what I suggest is that you should consider buying a water multi fliltration system instead.