Do I Need A Reverse Osmosis System? What’s In Your Water?

We hear about how unhealthy the things that we consume are every day. There is too much sugar in your breakfast cereal, processed foods have too many additives in them, and there is too much of this in that. What about your water? Should you be concerned about what’s in it?

Do I Need A Reverse Osmosis System? If your water has high levels of salt or other contaminants such as fluoride, lead, or mercury, a reverse osmosis drinking water system will greatly reduce the number of contaminants in your water. By using a reverse osmosis system, you will make your drinking water healthier to drink.

If you experience any odd tastes or odors from your water, a reverse osmosis drinking water system may be just what you are looking for. Also, if anyone in your home is concerned about high levels of sodium, reverse osmosis will help with that as well. And here’s why!

What is in your water, and why you don’t want it in your water!

Sodium:

Sodium is probably the most common reason that people purchase a reverse osmosis system.

Because our diet consists of so many items that contain high amounts of sodium, reducing how much of it that we consume from our drinking water is an easy and convenient way to cut out a great deal of sodium from our daily diet.

If you are concerned about your sodium intake, this may be reason enough that you need a reverse osmosis system in your home.

Fluoride:

Although fluoride is added to municipal water with the intent to benefit the people that will consume the water, some people feel that they do not want fluoride in their drinking water.

A reverse osmosis drinking water system will remove fluoride that has been added to your municipal water supply.

Chlorine:

Chlorine is often used to sanitize municipal water supplies. It is added to the water to ensure that the water is free of bacteria or other organisms that may prove harmful to the people that may be consuming the water.

Although small doses of chlorine are not considered to be harmful, regular consumption of chlorine can cause a person to experience upset stomach and mild illness.

If you are an avid water drinker and would like to drink water from your municipal water provider, having a reverse osmosis drinking water system with a carbon pre-filter, will provide you with a convenient supply of chlorine-free water.

Pesticides:

If you’ve ever been in the country, you have probably seen the beautiful acres and acres of farmland that grows the food that feeds the world.

Unfortunately, the pesticides that are used to protect our food crops can work their way into the ground, and into your water.

If your water comes from a well that is in the general vicinity of one of these farmlands, you may have harmful pesticides in your water, which can be removed by installing a reverse osmosis water system.

Lead:

We all know that lead in our water can make you sick and even lead to permanent medical problems.

Unfortunately, lead can still be found in water that has come into contact with lead piping or even lead-based products that could come into contact with your water.

If you live in an older home that you believe could have lead-based plumbing or other lead-based products, you need to have a reverse osmosis drinking water system to protect you and your family against lead poisoning.

Copper:

Copper piping is still very common in homes everywhere, and most of the time, the copper plumbing does not mean copper in the water.

But in some cases where your water may be corrosive, copper pipes can corrode and add copper particles to your drinking water.

The best way to treat this problem is to identify the cause of the copper corrosion and correct it. But even then, your drinking water could contain copper from years of corrosion.

Because of this, you should consider a reverse osmosis drinking water system to eliminate any possible copper from your drinking water, to prevent its ill effects.

Nitrates:

Nitrate is a chemical that is created when bacteria in the earth convert nitrogen into nitrate. It is commonly found in manure, a liquid waste product, and fertilizer.

Rainwater can carry nitrate deep into the earth and sometimes into your drinking water supply.

Just a small amount of exposure to nitrate can affect your health, so if you suspect any possible contamination of your water supply by nitrates, you should be using a reverse osmosis drinking water to remove it from your water. (Source)

Cryptosporidium Cysts:

Cryptosporidium Cysts are highly resistant to common forms of water disinfection. Normal chlorination or other disinfecting processes use are often uneffective against these kinds of cysts.

Cryptosporidium Cysts can cause severe diarrhea and stomach cramps if ingested, so they need to be eliminated from your drinking water to make it safe to consume.

Because they are not easily treated through chemical means, Cryptosporidium Cysts need to be removed from water by means of filtration.

Cryptosporidium Cysts are far too small to filter out by a normal whole house filter but can be filtered out using a reverse osmosis filtering system.

Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC’s):

Volatile Organic Compounds are all around us. They are in the cleaners that we use to clean our clothes, and in the fuels that we use to get around.

Unfortunately, they can also be in our drinking water.

VOC’s can easily dissolve in water as well as dissipate into the air.

Because these compounds are very resilient, they can remain in water supply for many months and still be harmful to humans.

Not all reverse osmosis systems are designed to remove Volatile Organic Compounds, but most highly-rated systems do a very good job of removing them.

There are many more contaminants in water that reverse osmosis can remove, you can do a test of your water yourself with a detailed home test kit.

Watch this short video to get a better understanding of what may be in your water.

Do you want extra sodium in your water?

Of course not! Even though our bodies need sodium in our diet, the foods and drinks that we consume on a regular basis provide us with enough sodium for our needs.

Drinking water that is adding extra sodium to our diet is just increasing our chances of getting ill effects from it.

If you have a water softener, it is adding extra salt to your water.

Even though a water softener does not actually add salt to your water to make it soft, it does use salt to regenerate its water softening resin.

A properly working water softener will rinse away the majority of the salt used for the water softeners regeneration, but some will be leftover.

If your water is relatively low in salt, to begin with, this is not really an issue.

But most well water has a fair amount of salt in it, and the addition of the leftover salt from your water softener can make the level high enough to be a concern.

You can easily test how much extra salt is being left behind after your water softener regenerates with a Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) meter.

You won’t find one in your local store, but I located one at a great price. Check out my recommended TDS meter here.

Simply test the TDS of your cold tap water after your water softener has regenerated, and then bypass the water softener, run the cold water for a minute or so, and then test again.

The difference in the two readings will give you a good idea of how much salt has been left in your water after your water softener has regenerated.

For example, your first reading maybe 300 TDS and your second reading after the water softener has been bypassed is 200.

This means that the amount of dissolved solids (primarily salt in this case) is 50% more after the water softener has regenerated.

Although a TDS reading of this level is not considered to be unhealthy, it is considerably more than in most bottled water or reverses osmosis water.

Is reverse osmosis the only way to remove salt from my water?

There are ways to remove salt from water other than reverse osmosis.

Distillation is one way that you could remove salt from your water, but it is not very convenient or practical for everyday home use.

By simply boiling down water and collecting the evaporated droplets for drinking, distillation leaves the salt from the water behind and the collected water is salt-free.

Deionization removes sodium using an ion exchange resin.

It works very much like a water softener, but instead of using salt to remove hardness that has collected on the system’s resin, it uses acid or base chemicals to remove sodium (salt) collected on the resin.

Reverse osmosis, on the other hand, provides a continuous flow of filtered water that can be stored in a reserve tank so that it is available at any time.

When a high volume of water is needed, a larger reverse osmosis storage tank may be added.

You can easily choose one of my recommended reverse osmosis storage tanks, and add it to your system in minutes.

Isn’t my municipal water already purified?

Your municipal water should be treated to make sure that it is consumable to the point where it will not make you ill. That does not mean that it is in any way healthy.

Most likely, your municipal water has been treated with a chemical to disinfect it. Chlorine is the most likely way that your water has been treated to accomplish this.

Your municipal water supplier has most likely added chlorine, but it is highly unlikely that they have removed it after it has done its job.

This means that you are probably regularly drinking water that has chlorine in it.

Chlorine is a poison, that is why it can disinfect water the way that it does. If it is not then removed, it is coming out of your water faucet.

A reverse osmosis drinking water system with a carbon pre-filter will remove chlorine from your water, making it safer for you and your family to drink.

Your municipal water supplier is probably not doing anything to reduce the amount of salt in your water.

Sodium (salt) is not removed by normal filtering or by adding chemicals like chlorine.

Having a reverse osmosis filter will greatly reduce the sodium (salt) content in your water while also reducing the level of other dissolved solids in your municipal water.

Reverse osmosis water will keep your healthy foods healthy.

You make sure that you get a good balance of vegetables, fruits, leafy greens, and everything else that makes up a healthy diet. Wouldn’t it make sense to rinse and cook your healthy foods in healthy water?

If you are cooking with water that is high in sodium or other dissolved solids, your food may end up tasting salty, or worse, it could end up with a chemical taste, like chlorine.

Pesticides, sulfur, and other contaminants in water make it taste and smell funny, and can make it unhealthy.

Reverse osmosis removes unhealthy minerals and dissolved solids from your water, making it healthier for you and your family.

But isn’t a reverse osmosis system expencive?

Absolutely not! As a matter of fact, I only recommend three under-sink reverse osmosis drinking water systems, and they range from around $175 to less than $400.

You can check out the current prices by checking out my recommended reverse osmosis systems.

And check my article How Much Does A Reverse Osmosis System Cost?

Only a few residential reverse osmosis drinking water systems are expensive.

There are a few out there that can cost well over $1000.00, and if you like bells and whistles, then you should look into getting one of them.

But if you are just looking for a reverse osmosis system to remove contaminants from your water, and leave it tasting crisp and clean, I strongly recommend looking at my recommended reverse osmosis systems to get an idea of which one is best for your needs.

Are you sick and tired of lugging cases of water every week?

The answer to this question always seems to be, YES! And for good reason.

Buying bottled water is expensive, and the cases of bottled water are a pain to carry.

What if you didn’t have to lug those cases of bottled water anymore.

Well, what would happen if you had a reverse osmosis system right in your home?

Your healthy reverse osmosis filtered water would be made at your home, rather than you having to carry it in.

Reverse osmosis water is often better than bottled water!

Just because it came from a store in a nice pretty bottle, and you have seen the commercial for that brand on TV a thousand times, does not mean that the water that is inside the bottle is healthy.

It just means that the manufacturer was clever enough to get you to buy it.

Most water that you get from the store is simply filtered water from a relatively good water source.

The manufacturer will take water from a stream, creek or river, run it through a series of sediment filters, bottle it, and then tell you how great it is.

Only a few bottled water brands actually use reverse osmosis to create water that is not only filtered for non-dissolved particles but also filtered for dissolved solids it the water.

These (as you may have already guessed) are often the more expensive brands. But just because a bottle of water is expensive does not mean that it is reverse osmosis water.

Look at the label, if it doesn’t say reverse osmosis water, it is just regular filtered water.

I have found that most bottled water brands have a Total Dissolved Solids count of 30 or above. Not bad for drinking, but not as pure as most people might think.

With a reverse osmosis drinking water system, you can have water that has up to 98% less dissolved solids in it than your home’s normal tap water.

This means that if the water in your home has a Total Dissolved Solid count of 200, the water coming from your reverse osmosis can be as low as 4.

That’s a lot better than the 30+ that is in many common bottled water brands.

How a reverse osmosis system removes unwanted contaminants.

A reverse osmosis drinking water system filters out dissolved solids in water, but not like a traditional filter.

A traditional filter holds the unwanted material inside the filter until the filter is changed, this way of filtering out dissolved solids from water would clog a filter very quickly, and the filter would have to be changed very often.

A reverse osmosis system passes water through a semi-permeable membrane which allows water to pass back and forth, but the dissolved solids in the water are rejected and rinsed away.

Check out this short video about how a reverse osmosis system can make your water better.

Reverse osmosis works a bit like a storm drain on a road.

As debris is carried over the storm drain, most of the water is allowed to drop down the storm drain, but the larger debris is rejected and washed passed the drain.

This isn’t exactly how reverse osmosis works, but it gives a good idea of what is happening inside of a reverse osmosis membrane.

But doesn’t reverse osmosis water taste bland?

The water that comes out of a reverse osmosis system all depends on the water that goes into the reverse osmosis system.

If your water is very low in sodium and other dissolved solids, the water that a reverse osmosis system makes may have almost no taste to it at all.

A mineral cartridge will add flavor enhancing and beneficial minerals to your reverse osmosis water, giving it a more enjoyable taste.

Is there a reverse osmosis system that makes water taste good?

If you are looking for a reverse osmosis system but are concerned about the reverse osmosis water be bland, consider getting a reverse osmosis system with a mineral cartridge.

Many reverse osmosis drinking water systems come with a mineral cartridge that not only can make your water taste better, but it will also increase the pH of the water which is considered to be healthier than standard reverse osmosis water.

Not all reverse osmosis systems will make your water taste the same, the more stages to a reverse osmosis system and the higher the price of a reverse osmosis system does not mean that it will provide you with better water.

I highly recommend checking out my recommended reverse osmosis systems to give you an idea of which type of system will be right for you.

If you are not sure which one would suit you best, leave me a comment, and I would be happy to help with your questions.