Water Purification 101: RO Membranes and You

Purifying your home’s water supply can mitigate the risks posed by undesirable chemicals and minerals, as well as water-borne diseases. These days, quite a number of households rely on reverse osmosis (RO) water treatment systems to filter out contaminants. These systems render water safe for consumption by reversing its flow, as the name implies, as it passes through a semi-permeable membrane and filters.

What’s In the Water? Knowing Your Contaminants

A lot of people take drinking clean water for granted. There’s a lot of things that you may inadvertently drink while you’re enjoying that tall, cold glass of water. Here are a few of those frightful stuffs: substances:

Ultrapure Water: An Overview

It's clear that you can't make water 100-percent clean, but what if you just did? Based on current water filtration technology, industrial reverse osmosis is as close to pure water as you can get, with a filtration rate of between 99 and 100 percent possible for most solids.

Nevertheless, take an expert's word for it when he or she tells you that you wouldn’t want pure water in your tap. The water that’s used to clean your iPhone is not something you’d want to drink as it can trigger hyper-hydration, acid reflux, diarrhea, and heartburn. Rather, water in its ultra-pure state is fit for industrial applications such as semiconductors and printing.

Choosing the Right Water Filter for your Home

Clean water means a healthy life for your family. Unfortunately, we can’t always automatically trust the water that comes out of the tap. This is why it would be better to have a water filter installed in your home. However, which type of water filter should you choose? Here are some of the common filters available on the market today:

Thinking with Membranes

 Reverse osmosis, as perplexing as the name appears, simply involves forcing water through a semipermeable membrane. This highly-advanced filter is the secret sauce behind the process's high filtration rate. For most solids like asbestos and toxic metals, the filtration rate is more than 99 percent (but not perfect). For monovalent ions like sodium, however, the rate is 95 percent.

This secret sauce usually comes in one of two forms: polyamide thin film composites (TFC) and cellulose acetate (CA). Here's a rundown of each.

Why Bother with Brackish Water Reverse Osmosis?

Many people think that bodies of water can only be classified as either ‘fresh’ or ‘salt’, with the former existing in limited quantities at any given time. True enough, it is often said that only 0.5 percent of the Earth’s freshwater supply is readily accessible, while the remaining 99.5 percent is either held in glaciers and icebergs or in bodies of saltwater deemed unfit for human consumption.