We have a Watts Zero-Waste Reverse Osmosis system. My husband installed it, no trouble.

Here is a link that might be useful: Watts Zero-Waste RO

Jack - there are endless thread about water softening and filtration systems on the plumbing forum:
http://ths.gardenweb.com/forums/plumbing/

We plan to have a Kinetico water softening system installed when we are ready. Right now the garage, where the softener will be installed, has to be cleaned up. That's DH's responsibility which he is skilled at avoiding.

We haven't decided on filtration. Kinetico makes a highly regarded RO filtration system, but DH says it wastes a lot of water. I haven't read through specs for myself, so I don't know if this is true.

I don't know how your water is clogging the filter after being softened. The softener is supposed to remove the calcium salts that cause deposits.

Cheryl

Cheryl,
We are good at avoiding jobs that aren't fun.

We have a kinetico system and have had it for years. The water started to look like it wasn't soft so we had it checked and there was some tannin in it. The serviceman put something in the softener unit and that fixed it. It also started to use way less salt.

I saw a post by grainlady and I think she said RO systems did not take out all pharmaceuticals or farm chemicals. I think that was in the money saving tips forum. She's seems to like the distiller or Berkey filter system.

Jack

Just for drinking, it seems to me a distiller is most likely.

No filters to replace, removes 100% of all impurities.

No installation, and relatively inexpensive.

dcarch

I have, and use, both the Megahome distiller and a Berkey filtration system. We've distilled our drinking water for at least 25-years and added the Berkey a few years ago as a non-electric method. The distiller puts off residual heat while working, which is welcome this time of the year, but in the warm months we mainly switch to the Berkey. I would recommend both for just that reason.

A distiller has always lasted us 5-7 years. At our electric rate when calculated with a Watt-A-Meter, it cost 21-cents to distill a gallon of water and I generally distill 1-2 gallons a day. I can buy fill-your-own-bottles RO for 35-cents a gallon.

To clean the distiller I use a stainless steel scratch pad (not an SOS pad, just a plain scratch pad) to scrape the "gunk" out of it after each gallon, and do a chemical clean every month with Water Residue Cleaner (Citric Acid Monohydrate). If you keep the inside clean it will distill faster than one covered with hard water minerals. We frequently vacuum the vent area to remove dust, and once a year hubby will take the air-hose to it. Earlier models allowed you to remove the cover and clean the fan blades and coils and that helped them last longer.

Personally, I would not invest in a Reverse Osmosis system because they do not remove small particles, prescription drugs and agriculture related chemicals from the water that the distiller and Berkey do. As an example. Once a year our city does a special water treatment for about a month that makes the tap water smell like a swimming pool due to the high concentrations of chlorine. Even with a whole house RO system and a filter on their refrigerator water/ice dispenser, our neighbor could still taste and smell the cholorine in their ice cubes and water dispenser. Using the distiller or the Berkey, that nasty smell/taste was completely eliminated.

You may want to get a few 3-gallon bottles to store extra water in as it accumulates. We use distilled water in our humidifiers and steam cleaners, as well as drinking/cooking water. The jugs are available BPA-free and I've purchased them from Target, Wal-Mart and K-Mart. I prefer 3-gallons because they are easier to handle than a 5-gallon. Although we store our emergency water on racks in the basement in 5-gallon jugs.

I have one of the smaller Berkeys (holds about a gallon), and that is large enough for our use. As soon as the gallon of water goes through I drain it off into a 3-gallon jug. We have a decorative crockery water jug on the counter we fill with distilled or Berkey water for our drinking and cooking water. We clean the filters in the Berkey at least twice a year, which is easy to do. You just unscrew them from their mounts and wash them off and use a Scotch Brite pad on them to take off the "gunk", and reinstall them. They last for many years of use. I do keep an extra set on hand, but have never had to use them yet. The month with the high concentration of chlorine in the water we noticed we had to clean the filters because they were really covered with that gunk!

-Grainlady

Good information Grainlady!

Very often when I serve distiled water to friends, I get this comment:

"Something is wrong with your water. It tastes strange."

People have no idea what pure 100% water tastes like. :-)

dcarch

I know what you mean dcarch... I had a research scientist I have a lot of respect for told me to sit distilled water in the sun (a nice sunny south window will work) for 10-minutes to improve it. I don't always do that, but it does something to the ions. I also give it a shake to aerate it, which I think helps. I prefer distilled over Berkey water, but it's fine for the summer and I quickly get accustomed to it. The Berkey water contains the minerals, distilled doesn't.

If everyone could see the stuff left in a distiller, they would be very surprised.

-Grainlady

Water filters and distillers do different things, don't they?

Thanks everyone for your comments. I think I will go with the distiller for now.
Jack

"---Water filters and distillers do different things, don't they?---"

Water filters can do two things:

1. Trapping particles by mechanical action, like a filter in a vacuum cleaner, this includes activated charcoal, which by its immensely large surface area, can trap particle of molecular size. It can filter out odor and some chemicals.

2. Chemical neutralization of many offending harmful chemicals.

Water distiller can do one thing: Condensation of water vapor back into water and any chemical which can be vaporized below 212F. This means distilled water is extremely pure, but may not be 100% pure, depending on the composition of the water source.

dcarch

Our water is very hard so would it be better to distill or filter water from the well or after it has gone through the softener?

Jack

With distillation, there is no need to do anything other than what Grainlady has said. While you have no filters to replace, there will be lots of deposits left by the old water to clean out.

You should also do a little Googling on health issues of drinking only distilled water if you don't think you normally have a balanced diet.

dcarch

The minerals in hard water are inorganic and our bodies don't have the ability to break them down and use them like they do in plants and animals that eat plants. If consuming inorganic calcium was all a person had to do to prevent osteoporosis, then anyone in our area who drinks the water would never have a calcium deficiency because our water is loaded with it.

People get their minerals from food. Inorganic minerals in soil break down into mineral salts that are used by plants. The plants convert those to plant-based minerals. The iron in your cast iron skillet is much different than plant-based minerals.

People consume a much higher percentage of food than they do water for their minerals.

As an aside... I'm 60-years old and have used distilled water for 25-years and I'm still as tall as I was when I was 17 when I reached my full height of 5-foot 3-3/4 inches. My physician says it's very unusual for a woman my age not to lose at least some height by this time in my life.

As far as whether to use well water or softened water for your distiller, I'd have to look at the user's manual for the distiller to be certain (if I still have it), but I don't think it will matter. It just needs to be potable water, not pond water or heavily contaminated water.

-Grainlady

Well to put things straight, distiller do not provide or produce 100% pure water. These systems will remove anything with a boiling point below water, everything else, remains in the water, well dissolved solids with a higher boiling point.

Reverse osmosis systems, because they now employ several stages, including what a Berkey system uses, removes everything from the water. I hate to say grainlady, but your wrong on this one, reverse osmosis will not leave behind small particles, unless smaller than a water molecule, which is why other methods are also used in today's systems. Not only that, they are the only systems proven to remove pharmaceuticals, other water filter companies say they remove pharmaceuticals, but do some research, and the scientist papers will show these results. An just after looking at the Berkey site, they do not make any claims of removing pharmaceuticals. And one more, reverse osmosis is the most effective solution for removing the radiation that is still raining down on us, and is in your water. Your neighbor may have got a bad system, but when you have a quality reverse osmosis system, the water quality is unmatched by any other filtration processes.

My reverse osmosis system came from Aquasafe Systems, which employs 6 stages, and removes everything from the water.

Here is a link that might be useful: Reverse Osmosis Systems

Posted by MichaelsAd "---Well to put things straight, distiller do not provide or produce 100% pure water. These systems will remove anything with a boiling point below water, everything else, remains in the water, well dissolved solids with a higher boiling point. ---"

I think that's what I meant with my few posts. Distilled water from tap or a good well will be very very pure, and for practical drinking purposes, you can say it's very close to 100% pure.

And I did say "Water distiller can do one thing: Condensation of water vapor back into water and any chemical which can be vaporized below 212F. This means distilled water is extremely pure, but may not be 100% pure, depending on the composition of the water source. "
What I said seems to contradict your information:
You said, "These systems will remove anything with a boiling point below water,"

I think the opposite is true. Anything with a boiling point below water will be distilled with the water and re-condensed with the water as an impurity.

You said, "everything else, remains in the water, well dissolved solids with a higher boiling point."

I think that's not possible. No dissolved solids can possibly be transferred to distilled water. That's how you can get pure distilled water from salt water.

dcarch

I agree with MichaelsAd that reverse osmosis is the most effective way to filter drinking water. Our problem, as I stated above, is that DH believes this wastes a lot of water.

I also agree with dcarch that distillation removes impurities with boiling points above that of water (212F at sea level). That leaves most petroleum distillates which are a problem for our water supply. There are stories of contamination of our underground water by leaking fuel tanks. Distillation would do nothing for this kind of problem, where the contaminants have BPs well below that of water. These impurities can be very dangerous indeed.

However, for anyone considering water filtration or softening, I strongly second the standard advice on the plumbing forum. Have your water analyzed before doing anything. Know what you are dealing with. You may find that the impurities in your water are harmless. They may not make your water taste good, but are not dangerous.

Iron compounds are one example. The city of Bath in England has been famous since Roman times for its water which contains high levels of iron and other minerals. When I drank it (they charged 50p for a glass!) I didn't like it at all. And it made horrible tea.

Water hardness is caused by calcium carbonates which are beneficial to many people. They also leave deposits in pipes, which is why some install water softeners. When we lived in Massachusetts we had no need for a softener, though lots around us had them and worried about the very low levels of calcium in the water.

Sorry, I just don't get the hysteria.

Cheryl

This post was edited by jadeite on Tue, Jan 15, 13 at 9:30