How intelligent is your RO purifier

Whatever weather is there, the blame game never ending process on the water supply and water quality both especially in cities like Delhi. In the last couple of years the problem of safe drinking water has gone from bad to worse. The drinking water problem is not just restricted to the cities in urban India but in villages too it has become a cause of concern.

35 years old Mrs Archana Singh a homemaker with family of 4 in Faridabad’s Greenfield recently switched to an RO system with zero percent water wastage. According to Mrs Singh she has got used to the certainty of collecting more waste water everyday than filtered water from her old RO system. Every time her sink collected more water than the glass she put under the RO tap. So much water wastage and that too in a place like Greenfield where hardly they were getting water one time a day for 30-40 minutes. For one litre of filtered water, her old RO purifier dumps some 3-4 liters of waste water. Initially, she has overlooked but every day when her overhead water tank emptied in the evening she got worried and started looking for a better option and finally settled for an RO with Zero water wastage technology.

Given the brackish nature of water supplied in her colony in Greenfield, is it from bore wells or from private water tankers, reverse osmosis is the only option at hand to ensure reasonable quality of drinking water. With the quality of domestic water supply being highly unreliable, dependence on reverse osmosis is growing in leaps and bounds. No wonder, some 1 million RO units get sold across the country each year.

This story is even worse in certain pockets in Delhi like Dwarka where the quality of water is even worse. Forget drinking, we don’t even dare to use this water for bathing and washing said Jitender Sharma an accounts professional staying in a posh society of Dwarka. We used to have a ultra violet purifier earlier but it was not able to remove the salty taste from the water, added Mr Raman. Today they have an RO and a water softener installed near the storage tank to have non stop potable water.

“The water scarcity in this season is a routine thing. But people do tend to waste a lot of water” a home maker from Greater Kailash Mrs Sood told. You walk in the morning and late evening in posh localities and find people watering the plants and gardens with municipal drinking water.

Knowing well the water quality is worse and in acute shortage, still there is massive water wastage knowingly or unknowingly. And this is not limited to one single city everywhere this is the state of the affairs. In country like India where over one lakh people die of water borne diseases annually getting safe drinking water has become a serious concern. With groundwater being the major source of drinking water and the fact that groundwater in one-third of the country’s 600 districts is not fit for drinking due to high concentration of fluoride, iron and arsenic, RO purifier has become the obvious choice for getting potable water. The domestic water purifiers market has positioned itself to reach each and every household with several variants to suit diverse needs. However the concern is massive wastage of water by RO purifiers which is being overlooked at large.

The biggest reason of deterring quality of water is the source of water is getting polluted.  Not just the rivers but the other sources like ponds, boring well even the municipal supplied water have effected with the rust, arsenic and other harmful minerals. The biggest effected are the river bed cities which are forced to consume water laced with harmful chemical, industry waste, coal ash, acidic water and  many more dissolved contents and minerals, salts, arsenic, fluoride which are not visible.

In the last couple of years, the water quality is going down while awareness for safe drinking water has also increased and people have shown serious concern for availability of drinking water which should be safe for human consumption.  The rising sale of water purifiers is the live example of this awareness.

However this also caused flooding of market with spurious products  The absence of reliable water standards in India further responsible for mushrooming of cheap and spurious products which have no certifications and standards. Barring handful serious players who have invested in R&D and regularly getting their product tested in international labs none is bothering even to talk any standards. The pity is user doesn't have any parameters or tools to gauze the quality of water one gets from his purifier. And, some time it may further harmful to consume water from such unreliable low standard product.

Besides, health factor, another woe with such spurious purifiers is wastage of millions of liters drinking water during filtration. A smart or intelligent RO is what we can say comes with Zero water wastage technology. In market there are such products one which can recover almost 100% of water however the traditional RO systems recover only 25% water and flush out 75% water during filtration. The other thing is your RO might cheat you and you end up drinking a water as all the necessary minerals and salt required for human body have flushed out without your knowledge. So what is the point for opting for an RO.

In the cities like Delhi where fetching drinking water is a big cause of concern million  liter of water flushed out every day. On an average a family of 4 required 25 liters of filtered water for cooking and drinking. To get 25 liter of treated water one RO is wasting 75 liters of water and if we go pan India there are 1 million RO in the country collectively flushing 75 million litre  water to drain.

The water quality is also varied here in city to city one may get ground boring water while the other house is getting the tap water supplied by the local authorities. However problem is both type water are hardly fit for drinking. The presence of dissolve salts and minerals which might harmful for human are commonly found in our everyday water. Hence it is the technology which need to be taken care while switching to an RO. On an estimate a wisely chosen product can help any household to save at least 50 liters of water every day.

Hence blind fold going for any purifier is not in the best interest of the consumer and society both. Choose a water purification technology which is eco friendly which minimize the water wastage and fit for all kind of dissolve impurities in the water. Unlike choosing a television or refrigerator a water purifier selection is a specialize job.  You can’t just pick any one, it should serve the purpose.