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How does reverse osmosis waste water?
by flangola7 4y ago
How does reverse osmosis waste water?
- delecti 4y agoYou don't get all the water out that you put in. Currently, very efficient systems output about half the input as pure water, and half as doubly-impure. Less efficient systems are more like 1:2 or worse. I'm not an expert and can't explain it much beyond that. This summarizes the math better than I probably could: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_osmosis#Disadvantages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_osmosis#Disadvantages
- cute_boi 4y agomaybe those wasted water can be used for other purpose like washing/flushing?
- BugsJustFindMe 4y agoYes but reclaiming it for reuse makes the installation much more complicated.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- qbrass 4y agoYou need pressure on the feed side to overcome the osmotic pressure differential between the dirty and clean sides. The dirtier the dirty side gets, the higher pressure you need to move water from the dirty side to the clean side. Eventually you have to flush the dirty side because the concentration of contaminants is too high and nothing will go through the filter even though there's still water that you could use if you could get it through the membrane. Under-cabinet RO systems are less efficient because they rely on the relatively low-pressure water that's running to the tap and are made to work without electricity.
- stjohnswarts 4y agobut do you really care? The "wasted water" is miniscule vs how much people use daily. You fix the 90% problem before you fix the 3% problem, at least that's been SOP in my engineering life.
- hgomersall 4y agoYeah, water that is drink is a trivial proportion of water that is used. If water that is drunk goes up by 100%, it's still a trivial proportion.
- flangola7 4y agoSo? Just increase chamber pressure