RO/DI Question

I carry one of these with me when I go hiking and I also keep one in my bug-out bag.




This is the way to go for drinking lake water if you want portable awesomeness.

 

There are no documented studies showing ill effects from drinking RO/DI or straight DI water. Several radical groups have tried to prove this but its not an easy task since the study group would have to survive on DI water alone with no other foods or supplements. We receive such a small quantity of minerals from the water we drink its a non issue anyway.
DI is not normally consumed though since it has a very bllah, bland taste and just isn't refreshing. What most of us do is install a bypass between the RO and DI so we use RO only for household uses like drinking, cooking and ice maker and RO/DI for the tanks.
Not bad advice at all.

 

I have this setup. I have two T's each with an on/off valve. One between the RO and DI. This serves as my emergency drinking water and another T between the DI and my ATO reservoir that serves as an easy DI source for topping off my FW tanks (and WC water for my FW tanks), POD farm, and whatever...

I haven't seen any hard evidence that DI water is harmful to drink... but I do think it's as natural to drink as soda... creatures (including us) have not evolved on DI water... IMO, short-term or sporadic DI drinking we can handle (in much the same way people eat airplanes and/or drink oil :sick3: to get into world record books) and I don't think it's harmful to a fault. But I would guess long-term, exclusive, DI intake would be harmful (or, at least, less beneficial).

As pointed out though, this isn't realistically testable on hoomans... Haven't seen an exclusive test on rats either though...

I do not agree, however, that the amount of minerals we get from water is negligible if you are talking about water in all its uses. So how exclusive are we using DI water? I mean, it's one thing to talk about the minerals we get from drinking water alone, but we also use water to cook with, raise livestock and grow foods... in an unrealistic world of using DI for all of the above, I think the impact of the loss of minerals would be much more measurable...

It has been shown (I will have to refind the article) that cooking with DI tends to leech minerals out of what is being cooked... If the cooking water is thrown out, you lose those minerals.

I do agree though that in the correct context, we're talking about drinking DI and using tap for everything else, more or less.

my last note, isn't proof of anything, but I do want to point out that lacking evidence that something is X is not evidence that X is lacking... in other words, the fact that it hasn't been proven that DI is bad, does not, by itself, mean it is not bad (nor does it mean it is bad, obviously). It has equally not been proven that long term DI drinking is not bad either...

And that's my ramblings on this for today ;D