When Would Whole Home Reverse Osmosis Make Sense?

Having represented the Hague Quality Water brand for years and having had nothing but success deploying their solutions, it seems odd that I would be suggesting a GE product for a client we're working with for an acreage near Sherwood Park.

The clients live in a high-end acreage in a beautiful subdivision in the Edmonton area.  They just purchased the home and are finishing the basement, as well as performing some other renovations.  With the steam shower they are installing and the high-end fixtures, it only makes sense to have high-performance water feeding their home's plumbing system.

Initially, due to the high flow rates, we were looking at either a dual residential softener system or a single commercial unit, depending upon the client's needs.  The WaterMax system has the highest flow rate of any residential water conditioner or water softener at 13 Gallons Per Minute (GPM) but that still may not handle the high-end, multiple nozzle steam shower with body sprayers the client is getting installed.  In order to effectively soften and remove the chemicals and chlorine, two units need to be installed in parallel, effectively doubling the maximum flow to over 20 GPM.

The down side to this is cost.  Clearly, for more performance, most people expect to pay more money.  In this case, instead of a traditional water conditioner plus reverse osmosis drinking water system, we explored a whole-home reverse osmosis system by GE - a new system called "PureOFlow."  This cabinet-style system will soften all the water and remove chlorine and chemicals for the whole home - without the need for additional plumbing to run lines to separate faucets for a traditional reverse osmosis drinking water system.

With this configuration, all the home's water would be purified, leaving all existing taps delivering bottled-water (or better!) quality throughout the home.  This is accomplished without the use of salt, a necessary addition to a traditional softener or water conditioning system.  In terms of price, it actually cost about $1000 less to go this route, and as a bonus, the repressurization system included with this PureOFlow system will deliver up to 22 GPM of water flow to the home - enough to run the steam shower unit without any additional hardware.

It turns out once again that it pays to work with a water professional that keeps up on technology and offers multiple solutions - not trying to force the same answer to solve every problem.