Reverse Osmosis water and drinking fountains - Printable Version
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RE: Reverse Osmosis water and drinking fountains - lbrachfe - 03-07-2015
my system is almost all plastic.. Still curious about this information on Resin systems being so corrosive and still recommended for drinking in manual
RE: Reverse Osmosis water and drinking fountains - Richard - 03-08-2015
sorry, I have been absent for a couple of days. The resin systems I was referring to are more technically known as Ion exchange beds. They are used to make deionized water which mean completely void of minerals. The beds are usually used in tandem, one for positive ion and one for negative ion exchange. Used all the time to make purified water in the medical manufacturing industry. The ion depleted water attacks metal, even stainless. My high school chemistry teacher is going to cringe at this explanation, but the ion depleted water is really trying to replace the ions or minerals to restore it's electrolytic balance. It sets up electrolytic corrosion in metals trying to find electrons. Similar in some respects to galvanic corrosion but doest require two dissimiliar metals.
As stated earlier, you do not want to drink deionized water, because it will leach the minerals out of your body.
So, you say what is the difference between distilled, RO, and DeI water. Distilled removes almost all minerals but does not leave any residual molecular electrical charges in the water. Works because only the water boils leaving the other stuff behind. RO, reverse osmosis, passes water through a membrane(filter) that is too small to pass the minerals. DeI uses an ion exchange bed to electrically remover the minerals from the water.
As you can guess, there are hybrid systems that use both RO and Ion Resin beds. I am sorry that caused some confusion in what I was saying was safe to drink and not safe to drink.
RE: Reverse Osmosis water and drinking fountains - folivier - 03-08-2015
Got me scared to drink water now! Bring on the beer!
RE: Reverse Osmosis water and drinking fountains - lbrachfe - 03-08-2015
I started chugging vodka after reading Richards first post and now may go back to drinking my r/o only water and will disconnect my resin/dei from the coach and just use for washing the bus.
RE: Reverse Osmosis water and drinking fountains - Chester Stone - 03-09-2015
Is not filtering with activated carbon filters good enough for a motorhome? I had a 25 gallon per hour OR on my Ocean Yacht which was necessary to even have any water, but is this a practical way to clean potable water for a coach?
RE: Reverse Osmosis water and drinking fountains - Fulltiming - 03-09-2015
As long as you are staying in locations where you can trust the quality of the water the only down side to Activated Carbon filters is that you may still get some high mineral content water. Even major metropolitan areas can have T&O (taste and odor) episodes that can make the water water less desirable for drinking and if they use surface water, occasionally may have an issue with Cryptosporidium which is very difficult to remove without ozone treatment, RO or microfiltration.
RE: Reverse Osmosis water and drinking fountains - prairieschooner - 03-09-2015
If I understand you correctly Richard;
RO water has been reduced of minerals as it passes through the filters and the membrane. This water is now hungry and "looking" to absorb whatever minerals are available. Copper lends itself to at least some of those minerals and this results in the degradation of our sweated copper plumbing as well as possibly other metallic items say faucets etc.
If this is correct then those of us with metallic plumbing should stay away from an entire RO system.
As a note I was looking in to using a Water Softener and found that the Salts used to regenerate the resins will also lead to corrosion of copper plumbing
RE: Reverse Osmosis water and drinking fountains - arcticdude - 03-09-2015
RO systems are terror on copper anything. They'll pull the minerals right out of anything copper that the RO water passes thru. You can get roughly 5 years out of anything copper before it springs a leak and needs replacing. I've been using RO systems for about 10 years now in multiple locations. I've had to replace 2 instahots that had the water run thru them as the tanks were destroyed by the RO water.
If you want to run something metal on the output side of an RO system, plan on replacing it every so often. Or just use a good filter and/or softener and not an RO system.
RE: Reverse Osmosis water and drinking fountains - whatsnewell - 03-09-2015
Well, my copper plumbing is safe since I do not have a 'whole house' RO system. The filtered water passes through plastic tubing to a dedicated spigot, which is easy to replace.....they do go bad over time.
RE: Reverse Osmosis water and drinking fountains - encantotom - 03-09-2015
the ro systems i am talking about are not able to be whole house. they produce limited amounts of water and only have a holding tank of a couple of gallons.
steve, i believe quite the opposite on soft water systems. i just installed a fleck 7000sxt on my house and i did it because the hard water was gunking everything up with calcium.
i will also put the same soft water system in the shop. so as to have it avail for showers and for two outside hose bibs for washing vehicles.
those of you that have a water line running to your fridge in your house, it is most likely a plastic tube run through a conduit. that is so you can have ro water to the icemaker. that is also why the fridge water tanks and lines are all plastic.
tom