The talk about RO water being bad for you got me going for a bit... so far the only "facts" I've found are from folks promoting alkaline water.
...It uses water only while it's filling its storage tank. When the tank is full, the whole unit shuts down and no water runs to drain. In terms of expense, it's like a couple or three extra toilet flushes a day....
Yeah, you have to take everything on the internet with a grain of salt eh?
While I don't doubt the bias of these guys:
Reverse Osmosis Water Waste
Here is what they say to that:
Some dealers tell you their units don't waste water after the storage tanks are full. That's an unfortunate, poor design, because those are the units which will fail the quickest because of membrane fouling from salts, metals and lime which may be added to many of our water systems to reduce metal pipe corrosion. With R/O, you're trapped either way!
Reading between the extremes...I think you get the idea that not
all RO systems waste water all the time, though some apparently run almost continuously. Those that don't run continuously still run a lot of water down the drain for every bit that makes it into the RO system. Not only that -- but you are running water through filters before it even hits the RO.
Edit: Wait a minute...shouldn't the plethora of filters sitting in front of the RO system take out those salts and things? Hmm...obvious obvious bias there, their information *seems* to be directed towards running a RO system without any other kind of filtration. Ok, well, they still make a semi-valid point...but take it with the bias that obviously exists therein.
Soooo let's try and come up with some realistic numbers. Assume you filter 4 gallons of water a day. If 85% of that is wasted, then you dumped 23 gallons down the drain to get that 4.
Just to put that in perspective:
A high efficiency dishwasher (Bosch) uses ~8.8 gallons
on it's least efficient cycle.
A high efficiency clothes washer uses about 22 gallons per load.
Most shower-heads are restricted to 2.5 gallons per minute, so a 10 minute shower is 25 gallons.
So 4 gallons a day equates to 3 dishwasher loads, 1 washer load, or an extra shower...each day.
4 gallons a day times 310 days a year (i'm subtracting a healthy 55 days, for vacation right? But some days you wouldn't use a whole 4 gallons so...) means 7130 gallons of water down the drain.
You keep saying you're in an area where water isn't a problem, and that's great! I guess all we're trying to say is that you're potentially wasting water when it doesn't need to be wasted...like going out and buying an inefficient car, old refrigerator, or some other inefficient item...where in this case there may be no distinct advantage to be had for all this inefficiency.
So all I'm saying, and you already said you'd look into this -- so I'll lay off after this post -- is truly, look into running the system without the reverse osmosis membrane in place. If that produces acceptably clean water, you'll save money on replacement RO membranes, have 1 less part to break down, you'll potentially be able to *easily* filter way more than 4 gallons a day (Remember the pre-RO filters are filtering more like 20 gallons a day), and you'll create a smaller environmental impact.
If, after you try that, you still find the water to be unacceptable tasting....than I don't think anything we could say would convince you to ditch the Reverse Osmosis system, but at least try the 4xfilter system first!
