I am interested in getting a unit for the home. I am currently using a Pur filter but I feel that I can do better. There are a variety of home RO systems available and they all appear very similar. Does anyone have any info on the subject? Is NSF certification inportant? Which manufacturers are offering quality products? Thanks
We noticed some hard water stains in our new house, so I called a friend of mine who does water treatment systems for a living.
We tested the water coming out of the kitchen sink (which is a hard water line), as well as every where else in the house, and despite the fact that there's a water softener in place that is properly filled with sodium, the hardness was exactly the same: 24 points. For reference, 15 points hard is considered very hard water.
As it turns out, if you have iron bacteria in the water (which you can easily detect by rubbing your hand on the water reservoir in a toilet in the house to see if it is slimy to the touch), it will ruin a water softener within a year or so, clogging it up so that it's ineffective. He said that the water softener probably did a pretty good job for the first year, and then declined in usefulness to the point of simply being a pass-through within a year or so after that.
He also mentioned that the water softening wouldn't really help get rid of other minerals and contaminants that might be in the water, nor eliminate bacteria and other undesirable biological agents in the water. This is important not just because you don't necessarily want to be drinking said things, but also because the same hard water stains you see in the sink basin will also be building up inside the pipes.
This is obviously bad for a house that depends so much on the plumbing (via the radiant heating system). What we're having installed is a chlorinator/de-chlorinator that will kill the various biological agents (including the iron bacteria), then take the chlorine out of the water (it's a carcinogen that you don't want to be drinking). Then it goes through a house-wide hybrid carbon filter to remove sulfur, and other various smells, then to a water conditioner, and then and only then into the water softener.
Doing the set up that way ensures that the water softener will not get clogged to the point of simply being a pass-through that does nothing, because the water has been purified of biological and mineral agents. Then we're having a reverse-osmosis system installed for the drinking water from the kitchen and for the fridge.
Basically the water comes in from the well, goes into a pressure bladder tank, then from there into a big 120 gallon distiller that a second tank mixes water/chlorine (5:1) into, so the actual amount of chlorine is orders of magnitude less than 5:1. It's just regular old chlorine bleach.
Then the chlorinated water sits in a big 120 gallon distiller tank. From there, it goes through a hybrid dechlorinator/carbon filter, then into a water softener, then to the rest of the house.
For the kitchen, it goes to a reverse osmosis filter for drinking water and water for the fridge.