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Comment by DantesKite | Hacker News Reader

Why I always recommend reverse osmosis water filters. Failing infrastructure and systemic human error are abundant.

Note that reverse osmosis can't remove some chemicals so it's not necessarily a replacement for the government doing its job.

Really? Which chemicals can it not remove? If true, I might be better off getting a distiller then.

https://extensionpublications.unl.edu/assets/html/g1490/buil...

That’s interesting. I didn’t realize some solvents got through the RO filter but other filters can manage it better.

> AC filters remove chlorine and certain pesticides and organic solvents that the RO membrane is not as effective in removing

It seems like as long as you have a complete water filtration system, you’ll cover most bases.

That's going to get expensive. Also not that distillation is useless for volatile organics, and can actually increase the concentration of lighter chemicals like benzene.

The filters that accompany a reverse osmosis water filter are fairly cheap, but I didn’t know that distillation machines could do that. I’m curious if boiling would break down the volatile organics.

Negative, 100 degrees C is far to low to degrade anything we're talking about here. Benzene, for example, is stable far beyond its autoignition temperature of 500 degrees C.

Reverse osmosis creates something like 4 to 6 parts waste for every one part of filtered water. It doesn’t seem sustainable or responsible on scale.

[1] https://inspectapedia.com/septic/RO_Waste_in_Septic_Systems....

I use a Brondell water filter that solves this problem. It uses less pressure and wastes less water. They have a white paper that goes into more detail about how they accomplished it if you want to Google it.

Otherwise I agree with you. RO technology has mostly stagnated.

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