A Promising Future with Reverse Osmosis Water Filters
A Promising Future with Reverse Osmosis Water Filters
One of the most exciting technologies to be employed in water purification in recent years has been what is known as reverse osmosis. Extremely effective and cost efficient, it promises to deliver the purest water yet while requiring very little in the way of maintenance or power. In fact, it’s being used all across the globe, from Singapore incorporating it into their future water plans to reverse osmosis becoming the most popular form of desalination. The technology continues to be improved on a yearly basis, making it more effective and less expensive, and reverse osmosis water filters can be bought for your house so that you too can have pure drinking water.
Power, Cost, and Speed
One of the biggest disadvantages of reverse osmosis water filters is that they tend to be slower than more expensive filtration systems. However, reverse osmosis water filters tend to be more effective at removing harmful materials. Consider UV filters – the UV rays kill harmful bacteria, but they do nothing to remove other harmful substances like minerals from the water. As such, while you won’t develop any diseases from water purified by a UV filter, you’ll still be drinking things like chlorine in your water as well. Needless to say, you don’t want to taste or drink that.
Reverse osmosis water filters use membranes to filter the water. As the water passes through such a membrane, only the water particles are small enough to fit through the minute openings. The other materials are caught. Unfortunately, such tiny openings mean only a certain amount of water can pass through a membrane in a given amount of time, making it time consuming to get any measurable amount of purified water using one of these systems. Increasing the size of such a system largely solves the problem, although speeds will still tend to lag behind other filtration systems.
Reverse osmosis water filters have given the entire world the promise of clean water. Where previously the only pure water was found in rivers and underground reservoirs, clean water can be obtained directly from the sea. While such large scale purification operations are still prohibitively expensive for most countries, the technology has the promise, given enough funding and research, to become the definitive water purification technique in the world. Considering that power requirements are negligible, reverse osmosis can be employed where there are no power lines or nuclear plants. Such solutions have been touted as bringing promise to Africa, the Middle East, and other water-starved locales around the globe.
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