It would be nice if we had an abundant, never-ending supply of clean drinking water. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, especially with a growing world population.
Increasingly, enhanced water filtration methods are being utilized to filter water for the masses of people. Reverse osmosis is one of these technologies, yet its effectiveness is questionable. Used in water filtration plants, reverse osmosis systems have made their way to the consumer market over the past twenty years.
The way it works is the opposite to the process of osmosis that we all learned about in high school. In osmosis, fluid that is less concentrated is naturally drawn through a semipermeable membrane, to fluid that is more concentrated. This process continues until both sides have equal concentrations. In reverse osmosis, high pressure is used to force water through the extremely small pores in the water filter to obtain clean drinking water. Home filtration systems often consume 4 gallons of water to produce 1 gallon of reverse-osmosis filtered drinking water.
As you can see, reverse osmosis systems consume a high quantity of water. They also consume time. It can take up to 3 hours to obtain one gallon of filtered water. Furthermore, it filters out many of the essential nutrients needed by the human body when consuming water, producing de-mineralized water with acidic pH. Reverse osmosis is often still used nowadays in municipal water filtration plants; however, the effectiveness of home usage of reverse osmosis systems is still questionable.
While any water filtration is better than none, reverse osmosis was invented in the 1970’s purely for industrial use, not to produce high quality drinking water. An adapter can be adapted to desalinize the water. Otherwise, the technology does not deliver on what it promises for residential use.
Multi-filtration systems are the most effective when it comes to water filtration. These systems have two layers–one for filtering out harmful chemicals such as chlorine and pesticides, and the other for restoring the pH balance back to water, making the water more natural tasting. These systems also allow for a proper balance of minerals in water by using an ion exchange system. These systems use carbon filters to remove harmful substances like chlorine.
It’s interesting to note that these carbon filtration systems are found in nearly every single fish tank, since chlorine found in normal tap water is toxic to fish. Of course, the quantity of chlorine is normal tap water is too small to be toxic for humans. But it can cause minor problems, such as the skin dryness (think of being in a swimming pool for a long time), aging, and small ailments that could lead to bigger things overtime.
Therefore, with a reverse osmosis system, you have an expensive, inefficient system that is difficult to maintain, and removes valuable nutrients important to the human body while allowing harmful chemicals such as chlorine and pesticides to pass through. Reverse osmosis systems tend to block molecules heavier (i.e. with a larger molecular structure) than water, while letting everything else pass through. Simply, it’s a less efficient, outdated system, and was never meant for home use.
Multi-filtration systems are the best performers overall. Dollar for dollar, the are more economical than bottled water (and safer, since the bottled water industry isn’t nearly as regulated as the home water filtration systems are in the United States and many other countries). Best of all, these systems often use dual carbon filters which are most effective at blocking contaminants in our drinking water, whether they be chlorine, or even pesticides and prescription drugs.
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