Watts-Premier ROs are not the pinnacle of quality but they are a good bang for the buck and I've found their CS and TS better than most.

"...our municipal water, which is very soft".

An intelligent discussion regarding water treatment must begin with the results of a water test preferably by an independent certified lab. Then we know what the water conditions are and what needs to be treated and that will dictate how the water should be treated. Need to know hardness, iron, manganese, sodium, chlorine (chloramines), pH, and TDS at minimum.

Water is either hard or soft. There are varying degrees of hardness but there is only soft... 0 hardness is soft. Any RO, regardless of brand, will become unhappy if it is fed water with any hardness because hardness can not be filtered out by the pre filters of the RO and will foul the membrane.

"The faucet leaks like crazy (through the breathing hole in the back)..."

Leaking from the air gap hole on the faucet can indicate a problem with the installation like a clogged drain line or indirect tubing run to the drain. Could also be that the lines are connected wrong on the faucet.

Also, if you used a saddle valve for the water supply to the RO that should be eliminated as they are MASSIVE water leaks waiting to happen.

"...the filters apparently last only one to two months..."

Can indicate water conditions that should be treated BEFORE the RO. What makes you think the filters need to be changed every two months?

This post was edited by justalurker on Wed, Nov 27, 13 at 11:38

Hi,

Thank you for the reply.

It's true, I did not do a lab test of the municipal water, only used a portable gadget (TDS meter) to measure the mineral content and got about 25ppm both for the tap and for the filtered water. That's pretty soft, I think.

Also, one clue about how hard is the tap water is given by how easy it is to rinse off soap on your hands; it takes forever with this water, hence I empirically suspect that it's very soft.

Regarding filter usage, after one to two months of regular use (maybe 2 quarts of water per day), the flow stops and the tank gets empty. As soon as I replace the red and yellow filters, the water is back, hence the assumption that the filters get clogged.

The faucet started leaking early. Despite re-seating the clamp connection to the sink drain and cleaning the waste water tubing, the water still leaks through that breather hole. I'm pretty sure I installed the faucet correctly (it's hard to mess it up when there are only three color-coded tubes).

And again... there is no sorta soft, very soft, really soft... only soft or hard.

TDS is not necessarily a measure of hardness. If you got the same TDS measurement from both the raw and filtered water then your RO is not working. A properly working RO should show at least a 90% rejection rate from raw to filtered water. A really competent RO fed properly treated water usually can achieve a rejection rate around 96-98%

Suspecting water is soft and assuming that the filters are clogged and being pretty sure you installed the RO correctly is hardly empirical data nor actual measurements or pictures so we can see what you did and/or didn't do correctly.

You asked what might cause the problems you listed and I replied point by point and that's about all I can do.

This post was edited by justalurker on Wed, Nov 27, 13 at 20:20

Your TDS meter is measuring the conductivity of the water and converting that to a TDS measurement. It's been a while since I was doing water chem all the time, but I think a conductivity measurement doesn't detect calcium or magnesium, the two elements that are measured as hardness.

Hardness is more complicated than a binary state, as stated by justalurker. But OP's statement that soap is hard to wash off usually is associated with hard water, not soft water.

If all you're concerned with is taste (i.e. chlorine removal), then RO is expensive overkill for what you want to fix. Typically, carbon and sediment filters do the trick for much less money (and more reliably, apparently). And the first step shouldn't be to get an independent water test- it should be to get your utility's annual water quality report and try to better understand what you're working with.

@lurker: I am ignorant in water filtration issues, please don't get annoyed by that. I had no idea that troubleshooting a user-installable RO system starts with a water lab test. I will look for the latest analysis report from my water company and update this thread with data.

@thull: thank you for your reply. I'm pretty sure that my water is soft, as it's making a lot of suds; hard water as I experienced before makes very little soap foam.

I am not concerned about the TDS levels before and after; the numbers are so low anyway (typical of the Hetch Hetchy water we're getting here). Truth be told I just want to remove the chlorine taste. Before installing the RO system, I used a Culligan faucet-attached filter with mediocre results taste-wise. OTOH the RO-filtered water tastes very good.

I looked at undersink filter systems such as the Aquasana and Aqua-Pure and would get the latter (based on consistent good reviews) but I am concerned that the flow will be too low, as there is no storage tank.

Just tested the static pressure and it's a good 50psi, which means that low pressure is not a concern.

There is something odd about your water if your TDS is, in fact, only 25 and your filters are plugging. The two filters you have to replace so frequently are your sediment and carbon pre-filter. Have you tried replacing the sediment filter only, or are they both plugging?

High amounts of sediment in your water could be causing this problem. However, if that were the case, you would probably see issues elsewhere in your home - your water heater, shower heads, faucets would become plugged as well. Is this the case?

High organics in your water, on the other hand, could cause the problems you are seeing. Does your water have any odor or color? If you let it sit for a day or two do you see changes?

@aiw_id: I fully agree with the observation that filters should not get clogged so easily with low-TDS input water. Still, this is the situation.

If I change only the red cartridge (sediment filter), the water production resumes briefly, then stops again until I replace the yellow filter too.

I have no issues with the showers and water heater, which I'm flushing on a regular basis despite the fact that no sediment ever comes out.

The tap water has a decent taste and no coloration and it's good for cooking and brewing coffee and tea; the RO filtration just brings it to the level of quality bottled water.

It looks like my water company is posting the quality reports on their website. I pasted the link as I don't know what to look for. One thing I saw is their water hardness classification, where soft means 75ppm minerals or less; mine has an average of 62.

Cheers!

Here is a link that might be useful: 2012 water quality report

Just taking a quick glance at your local water report and nothing jumps out as a concern.

In terms of why you get less production so fast, remember that the RO membrane is really the bottleneck, flow-wise. It puts out 50 gallons per day (gpd), if I'm looking at the right system. The other filters have orders of magnitude more capacity (think gallons per minute). It may be that your house pressure (50 psi) just isn't enough above the minimum that the system requires (40 psi, again if I'm reading the right info).

If you have a pressure-reducing valve on your incoming water line to the house, you could try adjusting it to get a higher house pressure (say 60 psi). That might take care of your issues with production.

The only other point I'd make is that you're comparing a faucet filter to your undercounter RO system. Of course, the faucet filter will have less time to exhaustion (i.e. when the water starts tasting like chlorine again) and it may not work that great to start with. I don't think that's a valid reason to jump to an RO system.

If taste is your main concern (i.e. you have good-quality municipal supply water and you aren't trying to filter water for someone with serious health issues), you should be able to put together a conventional filter system that will do what you want.

That said, try adjusting the house pressure. Not advocating tossing what you've already invested in if you can get it to work.

Quick update.

I finally got fed up with the filters lasting no more than a month and the persistent faucet leak and replaced the Watts system with the one from the link in the first post. I also installed a permeate pump in the hope that any increase in the intake water pressure will help.

So far so good. It's been a month and the new system keeps working as strong as the day I installed it. The water taste is similarly good, don't know about the pH thing (they claim the output water ends up being slightly alkaline), it may be a marketing gimmick.

I could have installed the pump on the old system too and maybe it would have solved the water production issue, but, since the faucet was leaky, despite the fact that the drain tube was clean and perfectly tied to the sink drain, I decided to try out something different.

I'll report back when it's time to change the filters on the new system.

My god, there's so much nonsense in this thread I don't know where to begin.
(qualification: major in biology, minor in chemistry at top 50 ranked US university)
There is: HARDNESS as used in the WATER TREATMENT FIELD, which means presence of (non-precipitable) alkaline earth metal cations (Ca, Mg, mainly) - these cause soap scum and can make skin seem dry to some people

There is Total Dissolved Solids: which is the sum of all dissolved ions and organic molecules, whether ionized or stable colloids suspended in the water (like milk)

Of course there are degrees of softness and hardness! Arguably there are 2 types of softness: water that has gone through a softener has the same overall TDS, but the water "feels" softer and doesn't cause limescale in a washing machine because the Calcium & Magnesium were replaced by Na or K (sodium or potassium) which do not form scale so easily and do not form soap scum at all. Then there's water that has gone through an RO unit and literally had most of the TDS of any type removed. This water is also soft and handles very similarly to resin-softened water.

"Any RO, regardless of brand, will become unhappy if it is fed water with any hardness because hardness can not be filtered out by the pre filters of the RO and will foul the membrane."
this isn't true at all - modern RO membranes do just fine with moderately hard (i.e., containing reasonable amounts of Calcium and Magnesium) water. I ran one for years on a municipal water supply that definitely left soap scum in the shower and measured over 200ppm of TDS, much of which was Ca according to their quality reports. Yes, if you want the membrane to last longer, it would be better to feed it softened water...i.e., Ca/Mg replaced with Na/K. But the membranes aren't very expensive compared to the cost of buying the amount of pure water they can produce...a $40 membrane will easily produce at least 800 gallons of water, which at the going rate of distilled water would be almost $800. I think I've gotten at least 2000 out of mine before I replaced them - that has taken me 3-5 years, and then only under a presumption they would fail soon.

"What baffles me is why the filters would get clogged with such a soft input water."
Yes, even if they were really junky filters, it doesn't make sense. But the softness is only part of the picture, if you had large (relatively) particles of some kinds of dirt in the water, they might not contribute to TDS depending on the way it was measured. Is it possible you had a leak in the supply line to your house or the muni. water had a leak at some point that let a lot of particulates in? I had a leak a few years ago in my line from the street and it clogged up my pre-filter, but not quite that quickly.

The funny thing is many people insist softened water leaves their skin "smoother" because there's no "soap scum" on it, but this is usually just because the detergent, bodywash, or soap they used is not completely removed. In contrast, the combinations of cations AND anions in hard water both push more of the organic molecules off, and convert some of the remaining to a harder precipitate. Frankly, I can't stand the feeling of being in a place with really soft water like the Gulf Coast, that leaves my skin all slimy after a shower. Just a question of what you grew up with, I suppose. This can be seen quite easily by further rinsing the skin with a weak acid dissolved in deionized water. This will truly push the detergent molecules off and give you an impression of what your skin really feels like with nothing on it but pure H20. Glass has a similar way of holding charged organic ions which is why all scientific laboratories give their glassware a final acid rinse. I know, I used to work in one.

"Also, if you used a saddle valve for the water supply to the RO that should be eliminated as they are MASSIVE water leaks waiting to happen."
I do agree with this. I believe all of these start leaking sooner or later. I've been happy with John Guest part ASVPP2, which, in the ultimate irony of ridiculous stupid regulatory obstruction, is not permitted on drinking water systems because it isn't certified lead free, even though the absolutely minute amount of lead it might release over 20 year would be filtered out by...you guessed it...the reverse osmosis membrane. There's surely more lead in 75% of US municipal water supplies on a per unit faucet basis than will ever be released by such a miniscule piece of brass.

BTW all this "alkalinize for health" stuff cracks me up. If you drink any municipal water, you're drinking water with a ph of 8 or above. They make it that way so that it won't dissolve pipes. Then look at all the supplemental calcium added to various foods. I really don't think there's a need to add even more to your water. In that case, why not just drink your municipal water which already has some calcium after passing it through a much cheaper carbon or KDF filter to get the chlorine flavor banished? Part of the whole reason SOME coffee & tea purists, for example, use RO water is because they believe the calcium ions interfere with the brewing process. It's like, what the %#^@ is the point of an RO unit that then turns around and makes the water non-RO? Is the Calcium they add FCC/USP grade? There's a lot of cheap raw ingredients coming from China that are contaminated with heavy metals!

This post was edited by davidrt28 on Thu, Jan 16, 14 at 16:09

First, water that is difficult to make soap lather is HARD. If it leaves a slimy feeling behind while washing your hands it's SOFT.

Your CCR report looks good. Not sure why you need any sort of home treatment. I'd bet most of your issues is being caused by your home treatment system.

We get a lot of customer complaints nowadys from folks who have these treatment systems in their homes. When we run our lab tests on their water and compare it to what is coming into the home they can't believe their water is a lower quality than what we sell them. There is a hugh business selling the home systems and they will go as far as convincing people that tap is not even safe to come in contact with much less drink. A recent complaint told us that her water was tested by Home Depot's company at a chlorine of 4.0ppm. We only have 2.0ppm leaving the treatment plant! You can imagine how she felt when she discovered she had been duped for $8000 for a treatment system.

Home systems are sometimes great on untreated water like rural wells but why pay to treat water that has already been treated?

Second, most taste issues are plumbing related or you are grabbing stale water that has sat in the faucet for a while.

@jcalhoun: fully agree with the empirical way of seeing if the water is hard or not (hard water does not make soap lather).

I also think that the water report looks good, but the taste is definitely better once the water passes through a carbon filter. It may be the chlorine that has to be removed or maybe something else; our neighbor's tap water tastes the same as ours, therefore is not my plumbing, therefore the only option for getting "tasty" water is to use a filter.

The only reason I've installed an RO system is because these come with a storage tank, while the simple carbon filters do not. Since my tap water is pretty good already, I don't actually need the RO step, but there was no other choice.

Our house water is fed by a spring some 30' up the hillside. The water tastes wonderful. Same spring supplies several houses on the country road via pipe laid decades ago. We are building a new house and the contractor suggested the Culligan rep come out and see if the hardness or sediments would be an issue for the tankless hot water system we plan to install. He offered a $250 comprehensive test, cost of which would be refunded if we opt for his system. I like the water the way it tastes now, but acknowledge there are particulates I can see occasionally. Other residents have been drinking this water for decades and no-one complains or suffers any apparent consequences. Do we REALLY need to consider messing with the water? The spring comes out of the ground, gushes down a 30' waterfall and arrives at my sink via a screened pipe placed in a covered pool at the top of the waterfall.

If you aren't currently having issues with hardness buildup, you are unlikely to have issues with your tankless. Just to be safe, I might have a hardness and pH test done - that should be FREE from a Culligan or any other water treatment rep.