Ro unit

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Shanetweedz

Aquarium Advice Freak
Joined
Aug 12, 2013
Messages
331
Location
Maine
Hi I have a ro unit and I live In maine and since there is two feet of snow on the ground and it's 20 degrees out I cannot use my ro unit which is usually hooked up by a spicket as of now I'm buying distilled water for my tank but it is pricey is there another option or can I use tap water, or does anyone else use plain tap water?



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I use tap water, but the number of people that can successfully use tap are few and far between. The water quality you need for it is hard to find.

There are connectors that will let you hook up a ro system to a regular faucet so that might be worth looking in to.
 
At 20 degrees you can run it hooked to an outside faucet (assuming they work), so long as you keep water flowing all the time through it. But the water may be really cold which reduces the efficiency of the membrane (does not generally harm it, just doesn't work as well).

But as Mebbid mentioned you can easily hook it up to an inside faucet/sink as well. You can get them to tap into copper like a fridge, to screw into the actual fixture (e.g. where the screen is on it).

Another possibility is hook it to the bottom drain on your hot water heater. Three caveats: (1) run a few gallons out really fast and make sure it comes clean, some tanks will have a lot of sediment (it's not a bad idea to do this in any HWH once a year), (2) check the maximum temperature on your RODI input water, most are in the 90-110 range, and compare to the temperature coming out of that faucet -- it will be a lot lower on most units than the real hot water taps, but might not be that cool, and (3) check it more than once as you use it, make sure it doesn't have a cycle where it gets too hot.

But a faucet hookup is awfully easy unless you have wacky fixtures.
 
Got a very long piece of piping and connect one end to my outside tap and pass the other thru the window in to the RO unit in my warm house :)


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