Drinking Water Systems
Save money on buying bottled water by installing a Reverse Osmosis drinking water filter. These filters fit under the sink, and purify the mains water ensuring you have safe clean water on tap
Prices for the RO undersink unit range from €549 to €749 installed
Reverse Osmosis
Reverse osmosis has the longest track record for offering safe domestic drinking water in the hyper-filtration range of a ten millionth of a millimetre particle removal size (0.00000001 mm). Most common filter cartridge systems employ conventional barrier walls with particle removal in the order of twenty thousandths to one thousandth of a millimetre (0.02 – 0.001 mm)
Reverse osmosis purification systems employ a mixture of conventional cartridges and cross flow membranes with 3 to 5 filter cartridges combinations. Most R.O. systems require a booster pump to force water through exceptionally small pore sizes in filter cartridges and membranes at high pressure.
Grant Water provide an extensive range of reliable, highly specified reverse osmosis filter systems.
Reverse osmosis history and current trends
In 1959, UCLA in California developed reverse osmosis (ro) with thefirst plant producing 22 m3 per day in 1965. This industry is now the fastest growing form of sea recovery desalination and has3,000 large reverse osmosis plants, each producing 4,000 cubic meters (4 million litres) of drinking water daily from a total of more than 12,000 municipal pressure driven desalination plants – 30% of global desalination, producing more than 40 billion litres per day.
With the growth of world population and the need for fresh water supplies becoming more acute, and the technology of reverse osmosis greatly improving with reduced unit costs, the numbers of municipal reverse osmosis plants are rapidly accelerating, with significant improvements being monitored for ideal water balance. The trend of municipal reverse osmosis has been followed by organisations such as the World Health Organisation, and their report out later this year gives major backing to the benefits that large and small scale RO plants offer for the future in a world of ever diminishing natural fresh water resources, where access to infinite sea water and inland water sources has major untapped potential. (The old maxim “water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink” will soon have its day.) Reverse osmosis is quickly becoming the way to solve many of the world’s water shortage problems.
Reverse osmosis has been commonly used for domestic ‘point of use filtration’for high quality water since the 1960’s. Booster pump reverse osmosis systems providethe highest quality water and give the most reliable water delivery. Typical domestic reverse osmosis systems based on 95% mineral extraction and 99.9% heavy metal extraction, allow plenty of mineral balance, for example at levels of 20 ppm on incoming water hardness of 400 ppm. Many of the biggest selling brands of bottled spring water such as Volvic quote chemical analysis on bottle labels as being under 10 ppm of calcium.
As bottled water can be 1000 times the cost per litre of municipal tap water and has massive carbon foot print and land fill concerns, the technology of reverse osmosis using chlorinated / fluoridated tap water or suitable borehole well water feed sources, filter these to exceptional levels of quality and safety, yet without the carbon footprint concerns and with costs between one tenth to one twentieth the cost of bottled water. Domestic and commercial reverse osmosis has been in domestic use for over 3 decades, and is the fastest growing acceptable, safe water technology.
Reverse osmosis systems are the only domestic filter systems able to remove impurities atthe hyper-filtration range. Properly specified reverse osmosis systems providechlorine removal at over 99% and the efficientremoval of sodium, toxic metals, nitrates, fluoride, cryptosporidium,bacteria and an extensive list of harmful parameters found in water.
RO systems can deliver minerals above 20 ppm without modification depending on original water hardness and can raise mineral content to any level ten times above this using special cartridges which are rarely if ever required.
Reverse osmosis pre-filters are changed every 1 to 2 years, membranes last from 3 to 5 years depending on the water used and can be tested at anytime for performance.