Comment by TrueSlacker0
3 hours ago
Its a reverse osmosis machine. You can get them for as low as $100 on amazon or anywhere. I have one at the house attached to my sink that makes about 20 gallons a day on demand and a small commercial one at work that cost 220 and makes 500 gallons a day (its about 2sqft in size) filling a large tank. Neither are large nor high in electric usage, the home one has no power, the small commercial has a small booster pump. Its the water usage that is high, to get a gallon of pure ro water is about 1.5 to 2.5 gallons of "waste". You can use that waste for watering the lawn or rinsing things but its extremely mineral heavy. You dont clean them just replace the filters every so often (not nearly needed as often as recommended)
Is the waste higher in the unpowered machine than the powered machine? Because saving electricity at the cost of water isn't necessarily a good thing .
The inherent issue with reverse osmosis is that you build up a "brine" on the input side. And the higher the gradient of these ions, the harder it is to do to the reverse move. The normal osmotic action is to pull pure water back through to dilute the brine.
I've heard of systems that attempt to just let the brine diffuse back through the source water system rather than dumping it. But, I think this is against code in any modern, thoughtful regulatory environment. You normally want explicit back-flow prevention to reduce the chance of contamination of the water system by end users.