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

A different and inherently more expensive type of RO system may be needed, depending on whether you can adapt what you have. Nominally, an RO membrane (preceded by some set of filters) will produce filtered water and waste (brine) until the back pressure approaches some fraction of the input pressure. The filtered water would go to a pressure storage tank and thence to the faucet or refrigerator, the brine is dumped into a drain pipe. Unfortunately, this simple description would lead to a brine flow that was always on. Hence the special faucet that controls the input to the RO filter. To get more output pressure and avoid this type of faucet, pumping schemes that lower the pressure on the output of the RO membrane while increasing it into the pressure storage tank are used along with simple controllers. (SpectraPure sells pumps for this purpose.) One type uses the brine pressure itself to drive the pump. For control one also needs pressure sensors, a controller, and a water flow cut-off solenoid. 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.

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