Just some thoughts I had about RO water. Please chime in as you like.
As I was making up more RO water for a water change, 250G, I realised that to get 250G of RO water, it takes at least 1000G of waste water. And that's only with a almost perfectly good running system and a booster pump to run 100 PSI thru the thing. But most of us, like me, are probably more like 1500G of waste water to 250G of good RO. That's a 6:1 raito for you numbers nuts.
So that started me thinking, is it really worth it? If you think about it, what do we do? We remove everything from the waqter except teh water, H2O, then we add a bunch of teh elements we just removed back into the water with the addition of salt, other chemicals, and so on. So is it really doing us any good?
Back in the early days of me keeping reefs, we didn't use RO filters and most people hadn't even heard of them. Yet we had sucessful reefs. Even after RO became a bid thing for reefs, I still was using my filtered tap water for top off's as it was easier and more convient on one of my tanks. And that tank thrived.
So as we profess to be conservationalist in fraging corals and breeding fish, what about the water we waste in making up our RO water? can we get a good enough water by filtering it thru a submicron filter and carbon? This does not produce any waste water. Are there other filtering methods we can use that will not cause any waste water like the RO system does?
Just some thoughts here as I watch my yard getting soaked from all the waste water when trying to make up my RO. I decided this time to go back to my roots per say and have removed my RO membrane from teh system other than using it for my ATO as the regular pressure without the RO membrane in place is too much for my float valve. I'm running a sub micron filter and three carbon filters when I go to make up my water for water changes. We'll see what happens. It work for us for years before RO came about.
One more thought on my rambling here, do you realise how much junk is put into the atsmophere by planes and washed into the ocean when it rains? Or how much gets dumped into it by ships? By the run off from rivers? Yet our coral reefs and fish still survive.
As I was making up more RO water for a water change, 250G, I realised that to get 250G of RO water, it takes at least 1000G of waste water. And that's only with a almost perfectly good running system and a booster pump to run 100 PSI thru the thing. But most of us, like me, are probably more like 1500G of waste water to 250G of good RO. That's a 6:1 raito for you numbers nuts.
So that started me thinking, is it really worth it? If you think about it, what do we do? We remove everything from the waqter except teh water, H2O, then we add a bunch of teh elements we just removed back into the water with the addition of salt, other chemicals, and so on. So is it really doing us any good?
Back in the early days of me keeping reefs, we didn't use RO filters and most people hadn't even heard of them. Yet we had sucessful reefs. Even after RO became a bid thing for reefs, I still was using my filtered tap water for top off's as it was easier and more convient on one of my tanks. And that tank thrived.
So as we profess to be conservationalist in fraging corals and breeding fish, what about the water we waste in making up our RO water? can we get a good enough water by filtering it thru a submicron filter and carbon? This does not produce any waste water. Are there other filtering methods we can use that will not cause any waste water like the RO system does?
Just some thoughts here as I watch my yard getting soaked from all the waste water when trying to make up my RO. I decided this time to go back to my roots per say and have removed my RO membrane from teh system other than using it for my ATO as the regular pressure without the RO membrane in place is too much for my float valve. I'm running a sub micron filter and three carbon filters when I go to make up my water for water changes. We'll see what happens. It work for us for years before RO came about.
One more thought on my rambling here, do you realise how much junk is put into the atsmophere by planes and washed into the ocean when it rains? Or how much gets dumped into it by ships? By the run off from rivers? Yet our coral reefs and fish still survive.
