Drinking Water R/O Unit

Can you use a drinking water filtration system such as a R/O or RO/DI to SAFELY add tap water to your tank? The tank I'm planning on assembling is going to have 110-130 gallons of total water volume. I'll need lots of water, and often.

The reason I ask is because I am going to School next year, so I need to Save Money where I can.

 

Your best bet is to go RO/DI and send the clean water to a storage tank/container of some kind.

You can find a number of systems out there. Just make sure to get an in-line or hand held conductivity meter so you can verify when your DI resin is depleted.

 

You can use a drinking water system, but you need to add a di stage to it. That's what I had for about a year. If you don't, you'll just be adding phosphates and other bad things to your tank. You can get the 10" filters cheap, so it's not hard to add on.

 

In general, drinking water systems are usually lower 15 to 25 GPD production rate so take much longer to make water. They usually have lower quality, higher micron sediment filters and often have GAC granular carbon instead of extruded carbon blocks so last about 300 total gallons per replacement versus up to 20,000 gallons per replacement. What this means to you is you end up replacing filters and membranes more often since it is not protected as well and it all ends up costing you more money over its life. You would spend $100 to $200 on a decent drinking water system and another $35-$50 to add a full size DI filter plus another $20-$30 if you decided to upgrade the sediment and carbon filters. No matter what you buy you would need a handheld TDS meter for another $25 or so regardless.

On the other hand a good reef quality RO/DI system costs you about $130 and you can add a drinking water faucet, ASOV and tank for around $59. You get a 1.0 micron absolute rated sediment filter, 1.0 micron solid carbon block good for about 12,000 gallons of normally chlorinated water, a specially treated and batch tested high rejection rate 90 GPD RO membrane and a full size 20 oz vertical refillable DI filter filled with fresh reef specific DI resin. The drinking water kit comes with the RO pressure tank, faucet, autoshutoff valve, inline carbon tsate and odor filter and misc fittings. To add it to a RO/DI you would want to add a check valve for around $8-$10 to isolate the pressurized RO drinking water tank from the reef DI water which is a simple change.

I originally went the drinking water route many years ago. I had the watts Premier system from Costco. Eventually I upgraded filters and RO membrane, added a larger presure tank, check valve and all that and I had a mint invested and still had white non see through housings, no pressure gauge and just not as good a system.
I sold it all and started over with a ree fquality RO/DI and added the drinking water kit and had about half as much invested and had a much better, longer life, lower operating cost system.