As someone well steeped in a medical and science background, I can't really recommend an ionized water system over RO. No offense. Of course all unstudied things remain a mystery, but sometimes there are reasons we don't study things, because they don't make a lot of sense. Water is an extraordinarily weak buffer. You can sway its pH by electrolysis, but upon contact with any small amount of acid or base, it will quickly lose whatever pH it has. Read, stomach acid vs ionized water... stomach acid wins. If your goal is better tasting water, then carbon may be fine. If you want to remove tasteless chemicals and toxins, maybe RO is for you. The claim that there are 80,000 chemicals and toxins in the water supply at one time or another is sort of like claiming that every once in a while somebody gets hit by a bus, or struck by lighting. Yes, they are very real things, like chemicals in water, that may cause harm. But living your life in fear of such things can make people do extreme things, and waste a lot of money. You are not going to stay in your house, and avoid all roads to avoid lighting and buses, nor should every house install an RO system "to be safe." If your city has a bad track record for maintaining its water, you live near a clearly unregulated pesticide production facility, or you live on a farm with a well that has fluctuating water quality, it may be that an RO system is for you for "safety reasons." I still maintain an RO system is for us water snobs that not only want better tasting water, but clear ice, clear tea, and better water for our plants and high maintenance fish....

Some water sources, when subject to reverse osmosis filtering, become acidic (low pH), which could cause metal ion leaching from metals such as brass. To avoid this there are two approaches. One is to use inert tubing such as PEX (for large diameters 1/2 and up), regular polyethylene tubing (the usual approach for 1/4 or 3/8 diameters -- Portage Specialty Co., McMaster-Carr, etc.), or stainless steel. Stainless steel tubing and storage tanks would also be suitable for water chillers. The other approach is to follow up the RO system with a cartridge that buffers the water pH to slightly alkaline. (SpectraPure may have these.) This might add some calcium ions to the water, so the reason for using an RO system would be a factor; that is, whether it is mainly for cleaning or to make nearly distilled water). As it happens, my RO water is slightly alkaline, so leaching is not an issue. I use 3/8 poly for household distribution. kas Here is a link that might be useful: Portage Specialty Co

There is no reason other than available space that precludes putting an RO system in a remote location and plumbing it to wherever you need the water. By system I mean carbon prefilters (essential if there is chlorine or chloramine in the water, or any silt), RO membrane filter, nominal post carbon filter, and storage tank, at a minimum. More complex setups are often used. See Spectrapure's website among many others for examples. The plumbing over longer distances is most easily done with 3/8th-inch food grade polyethylene tubing, connected with John Guest type fittings. Portage Specialties, among many sources, has tubing and this type of fitting for sale. Just cut the tubing to length and push to connect. My RO system is plumbed to feed a centrifugal humidifier, a future family room counter area, a plant watering wand, two kitchen sinks and a refrigerator icemaker RO filtering can leave water slightly acidic, which promotes corrosion of some faucets. This depends on the nature of the water being filtered. I recently determined that my RO water is still alkaline after filtering alkaline pre-treated municipal type water, so I don't have a problem of that sort. If acidic, then another "filter" is needed on the exit end of the RO system that contains limestone chips to neutralize the water. Simple RO systems avoid all this by using plastic and stainless steel faucet parts. The approach I recommend is determine what you want the RO water for and how much you will use, peak and average. Then find a system that will accommodate those requirements. kas

If you do buy an RO system, you might want to check out the Brondell H20 Circle+. It is $370 on Amazon. (I bought our first one for only $300, but the price has gone up since then.) I can't vouch for it 100% yet since it has only been 2 weeks. :-) But I can say that the design is very nice and it is pretty simple to hook up, although we did have to buy a different valve to hook up to the Karbon. The nice thing about this system is the filters and tank are all contained in one unit. (See picture.) It is a much cleaner design than other RO systems, and it looks like changing the filters will be easy. (Or old system was a real pain.) Of course, the filters are not cheap. I have found them at Brookstone for $56, but they are $80+ on amazon. I'm hoping since we will be using 2 systems we don't have to change the filters as often. You might want to do the math and see what is more cost effective.