Spectrapure 90 gpd ro/di

[Supersizeme]

Ok so I know who will answer these questions, and he is the reason I purchased this unit.

So my questions are , 1. can I drink the "waste water" beside using it to water the plants and maybe filling up the washing machine. 2. I am a little worried about touching the flow restrictor stuff any reccomendations other than just take my time, lol ?

3. when I hooked up my tds meter and I did run the unit last night for just a bit to check it out, the meter said that I only had 0001 ppm coming into and 0000 ofcourse coming out, this cant be correct can it?

 

I forgot to bring the manual with me today to read through it but I thought I would post this to see if I could get a some answers.

Thanks

[marinekeeper]

flow restrictor stuff is easy. I have the same unit and needed to trim mine down. Its a piece of cake.

[Rem]

I can only answer the first question.. your waste water is perfectly fine to drink, its just excess tap water from the unit..

 

You can however turn your ro/di unit into a drinking water purifier by putting a valve right before it goes into the DI unit (it might already have one, I have a different unit), running that tube through a carbon filter than out to your water drinking jugs. A real good taste with the carbon filter at the end.

[AZDesertRat]

From the top:

1. No, you should not drink the waste stream. The reason is while it has been through a sediment filter to remove the big stuff and a carbon block to remove the chlorine it will be approx 25% higher in TDS than the tap wate rwas since it contains the TDS removed from that one gallon of treated water which gets concentrated into the four gallons of waste. it has not been through the membrane so could potentially still contain contaminants if they were in the tap to begin with. I send mine down the drain since all our wastwater is recycled and reused anyway. I suppose I could capture it and water plants or the lawn but then you need to attention to plumbing codes and potential cross connections and backflows.

Putting it in the washer is OK but requires monitoring so you don't overflow the tub and get the motor wet.

 

2. Adjusting or trimming the flow restrictor is very easy following their provided directions. Spend the few minutes to calculate your waste ratio before any adjustment then look up your values on the provided chart and trim accordingly. If you are already close to 4:1 you might not need to trim anything but you need to measure your waste and good to know for sure.

 

3. The readings are correct. You are monitoring the post RO and post RO/DI water not your tap water so the RO is going to be somewhere around 98% less TDS than the tap and the RO/DI should be 0 TDS. Given your number I would guess your tap TDS to be around 100 which is not bad with the national average getting upwards of 250.

[Supersizeme]

Thank you guys for the replies and Thank you AZDesertRat !

[Supersizeme]

Ok, so I am apparently a dumbass...

 

Waste Water: 760 ML/MIN

Product: 230 ML/MIN

3.30 is what I get when I divide the two.

 

My question is, do I need to cut the flow restrictor, or adjust the flow restrictor in any way?

I am running about 72 PSI(in the green zone) is this ok? Just wanted to make sure. Now my TDS meter is reading zero for both in and out... This can't be right?

[Supersizeme]

bump

[AZDesertRat]

I would leave the restrictor alone at this point. You obviously have low TDS tap water so the membrane will stay cleaner than someone with higher TDS waters.

Inline TDS meters are OK but have their drawbacks. I have two of them but use them as a guide and normally pull out my handheld for accuracy and portability.

The inline is dedicated to two points and cannot be used portable, it usually reads post RO and post DI or finished water in a RO/DI system. To troubleshoot or check your inline readings you need a handheld, maybe you can borrow one from a friend?

Inlines are also not truly temperature compensated so can vary a bit there too, they read air temperature and not water temperature and they are rarely the same. TDS measurements vary with temperature changes and need to be compensated for with a temperature correction factor.

 

You may read an indicated 0 TDS on the post RO with an inline and its probably close, say within 10 or so since its a 2% of full scale accuracy meter. I would not get too concerned about it but try to check it against a calibrated handheld one day so you have an idea how close it is. Also make sure the probes are fully inserted in the tees and rotated in the correct position according to the flow arrow. Another quick test is swap the IN and OUT probes to see if they agree or are close to one another.

[Supersizeme]

Thank you again, I am gonna try swapping the the probes to see what that might tell me and I will be picking up a handheld tds meter as well.

Thanks again AZDesertRat !

[AZDesertRat]

I love my handheld TDS meter. I can test the tap water, confirm the readings from my inlines, test the ATO storage, bottled water, vending machine or water store, the neighbors, loan it to a friend etc.

The one I have is the HM Digital COM-100, its more expensive than the others but is much more accurate and can read in tenths of a part per million vs others that read in 1's. I would recommend a HM TDS-3 or TDS-4 at a minimum since they also have a digital thermometer function too.