Water Purification and Energy Usage

The need for clean drinking water - water that has had foul-tasting and potentially chemicals removed from it is becoming quite commonplace.  Whether you choose to purchase bottled water, or opt for the convenience and savings of having a water treatment system in your home, most people have decided that drinking from the tap is not the best choice.

There are three basic ways to treat water in a residential setting and we'll touch on each of them here briefly.

1 - Carbon filtration.  This is common nowdays.  This can be something as simple as a filter attached to your kitchen sink's faucet, it could be in the form of a pitcher with a disposable filter built-in (like a Brita-style system) or in more-elaborate cases, or these can be built-in under the sink with an additional "gooseneck" style faucet on the side of the sink.  No matter the style, these systems do mostly the same thing.  Some have sediment filters built in, some are just carbon, most are both.  These systems are a good start and a definite improvement over the water as it is delivered to the home.  Using a carbon filter is most suitable for city water as it does little to remove several types of chemicals and does nothing to remove bacteria from water.

2 - Reverse Osmosis.  This is taking something like the previously-mentioned carbon filtration and adding a "membrane" to the system.  This allows water to be split into two streams: One, a purified stream of "product" water which gets stored in a pressure tank, and two, "reject water."  The reject water is water that contains contaminants which cannot pass through the microscopic pores of the reverse osmosis membrane.  An easy way to describe a reverse osmosis (RO) system is to compare it to a 'washing machine for your water.'  There are different levels of efficiencies and different systems are designed to produce the desired amount of product water each day, as well as delivering it at varying pressures and flow rates.  Residential reverse osmosis systems run using just the pressure of the water in your home to power the process.  (This is unlike commercial RO systems which need powerful pumps to force water at high pressure through the system.)

3 - Distillation.  This is a process which mimics the Earth's own 'recycling' program.  In nature, water from rivers, lakes and streams evaporates up to the sky leaving behind impurities and coming back down in the form of rain.  Pesticides, herbicides and toxic chemicals have rendered this process less-effective than it used to be, but the mechanics are unchanged since this planet came to be.

In a home, a distiller replicates this process using a powerful burner element to evaporate the water, then a series of condensing units cools the steam and turns it back into water.  Carbon filtration is now strongly recommended for distillers because many chemicals have lower boiling points than water.  This means a distiller can actually concentrate some chemicals into the 'pure' water it creates.  Fortunately, most of these chemicals can be removed with carbon filtration, but it is definitely something you'd want in your distiller system.  Most distillers also will use an electric pump to deliver the water to a gooseneck faucet up at the kitchen sink.  (Since the process does not result in any pressurized water, mechanical pumps are necessary to deliver the water to the tap.)

Distillers used to be the most popular of the in-home but with rising energy costs, they are becoming less and less attractive.  We recently had a client ask us to replace his 2-year old distiller just because of the energy usage.  Reverse osmosis water is an excellent option in terms of energy usage because in most cases, there is no power used to run the system.

In terms of maintenance, reverse osmosis is MUCH simpler to keep running properly.  Filters are changed out on a set schedule (see your manufacturer's instructions as this can be anywhere from every 3 months to 2 years depending on the brand and type of filters being used!)  The membrane gets changed when the product water quality begins to degrade and can be determined with simple and inexpensive TDS Testing Strips.  These will tell the owner if the system is working properly, or if it's time for a change.

With a distiller, chemicals like muriatic acid need to be used by the homeowner to clean out the residues left behind in the boiler.  As most city water is hard water, there is a lot of calcium that gets trapped in here and takes work to remove.  There are some greener products for cleaning distillers, but most have been reported as just making the process take longer and requiring more "elbow grease" to clean.  This is one aspect that really makes reverse osmosis an easier prospect for homeowners.  Changing filters is a simple process and takes just a few minutes to perform.

Plain carbon filtration, as previously mentioned, is a definite upgrade over plain tap water, but there are dissolved chemicals which can't be removed this way.  Lead, flouride, nitrates, metals, sodium and other water contaminants pass right through these filters.  (Because many cities have changed from adding chlorine to adding 'chloramine' these contaminants - ESPECIALLY LEAD - have become problems in the drinking water as chloramine causes a leaching action to occur.)  Maintenance on a carbon filter system is similar to reverse osmosis.  A cartridge of some sort is simply changed out - again, much easier than distillers, and again without the need for toxic and foul-smelling chemicals.

We recently had a client call us asking to replace his two-year old distiller with a new reverse osmosis system just because of the energy usage.  As soon as he started running his distiller, the family's power bill jumped noticeably.  In fact, he was able to make back all the money spent on a new RO system just with the energy savings from switching away from his distiller.  Even factoring in the filter changes (for the system he chose, annual filter changes are all that is required) he was able to get back all his money in less than two years!  He was also quite happy he would never need to use harsh chemicals to clean his drinking water system ever again.

For this client, there was a huge savings and these days, when everyone is concerned about the planet and reducing their energy consumption, reverse osmosis just makes more sense.