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Comment by soligern | Hacker News Reader

I use reverse osmosis well water, all stainless steel cooking utensils, buy my meat from a farm and only buy fresh veggies. I only drink out of glass and use glass containers for storage. That’s about as much as I can handle and I think that covers all major sources.

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Doesn’t your food is a potential major source if the farms you go does not use reverse osmosis for their animals/plants ?

I see you do as much as you can do but I don’t think anyone is preserved because those chemicals are spreads. Wouldn’t be surprise if animals natality degrades too.

So many questions on the reverse osmosis usage.

What kind of flows do you get from it? I get the impression they convert water very slowly so it's not like an instant open tap. For example could you connect to a dish washer or is it only a reservoir for drinking water.

What is the water waste like, as in how many liters are you spending in the membrane cleansing versus actual drinking water?

What kind of material is used for the tubing and containers it uses? I am a little be sceptical of using flexible tubing (usually flexible because of plasticizers) to then feed and accomulate water into a reservoir.

There is a reservoir so it is instant on. The flow is reasonable, you can fill a glass of water in 5-7 seconds. I have to replace the membranes every 6 months. Waste water disposal is hidden so I’m not sure how much gets discarded. Flexible tubing seems to be used.

Farms that thought they were organic were getting free wastewater sludge -- recommended by the EPA -- and applying it to the land as fertilizer. The tiny fraction of land that they test gets reclassified as permanently unusable for agriculture now. But it was an extremely common practice and they barely test any farms. So do the math. It's everywhere. Particularly in the meat and veggies.

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