Many times water treatment dealers sell water softeners and never offer the customer a reverse osmosis drinking water system. In that case we did half the job. Part of the issue is understanding water and the reasons we use water. In the industry we classify water usage into three categories, utility water, work water, and life water. Utility water is the water you water your lawn with, wash your car with, and spray off your driveway with. Work water is the water you use to wash your clothes, clean your sinks and toilets, and do your dishes with. Life water is the water you are going to drink, cook with, and make soups and juices with.

The water softener is for work water. It protects your fixtures, makes cleaning and laundry easier, gets your body cleaner without the soap residue, and increases the life of your cloths, dishes, appliances, razor blades etc. Life water comes from a reverse osmosis unit. It is a multi stage filtration process that takes the water at the point of use and turns it from work water into life water. The philosophy is that your body is about 70% water. All of your organs are mostly water. We would only survive several days without water. So the cleaner the water you absorb into your system the better off your body and organs will be. Once the water has been purified we would strongly recommend that you then put on a post alkaline filter to increase the pH and negative ORP’s you will be taking into your body. See our blog post on Alkalizing.

A revers osmosis system, as mentioned, is a 3, 4, or 5 stage filtration process. The systems we use is a 4-stage 50 gallon per day reverse osmosis unit. The system fits neatly beneath the kitchen sink, at least ours do as we use a low profile high gallon per day system. The first stage is a sediment filter otherwise known as a prefilter. This is a spun blown polypropylene filter which had a nominal filtration capability of 5 microns. To give you a visual of how small 5 microns is, if you look at the diameter of human hair, that is 20 microns. The human eyes limit is 20 microns. So the sediment filter filters to 4 times smaller than the diameter of human hair.

After the water passes through the sediment filter it then passes through a granular activated carbon filter (GAC). This is a highly adsorptive media made from coconut shells. One teaspoon of carbon has the surface area of a football field. Carbon is used to remove chemical organics from the water, as well as clarify the water, and remove taste and odors. The main function of the carbon in a reverse osmosis system is to remove the chlorine which is detrimental to the membrane in the unit.

From there the water passes to a semi-permeable membrane. This is a TFC (Thin Film Composite) membrane. The best way to understand a membrane is to think of a paper towel roll. The water penetrates from the outside of the roll towards the inside trapping all of the contaminants within each of the rolls or folds. Water is then run parallel along the membrane grabbing the contaminants and flushing them out to drain. The processed water or permeate water is the purified water which is the water we will drink. The reverse osmosis membrane filters the water to .0001 microns. For example, an ecoli bacteria is .5 microns in width by 2 microns in length. The smallest virus is about .02 to .001 microns in size. This means that a reverse osmosis membrane will reject 94% to 99% of almost all contaminants.

After the water is purified it then passes one more time through an inline GAC filter before it passes to the faucet where you will access it for a delicious drink of water. Once you drink water from your reverse osmosis system you will have a hard time drinking water from a restaurant without filtered water or at your friends house. You will definitely taste the difference between filtered life water and ordinary tap water.

If you do not have a reverse osmosis system, and are concerned about your health, and the quality of your water, you will definitely want a reverse osmosis system under your kitchen sink. It really does make a difference what quality of water you drink. If you would like clean, pure, refreshing water, call us, we would love to install a reverse osmosis system for you and let you experience the difference.