No matter how new or clean your pipes are, it’s hard to be 100% certain of what’s in the water that’s coming through your kitchen taps. Luckily, there’s a way you can ensure you and your family are getting the purest, healthiest drinking water possible—by investing in a reverse osmosis system.
What Is Reverse Osmosis?
To understand reverse osmosis, it makes sense to first talk about what osmosis means. At its simplest, osmosis is a natural, passive quality of water in which it naturally moves across barriers from an area of low dissolved material to one of high dissolved material. Consider how your fingers get pruney after spending too much time in the pool or a bath; in this case, pure water is naturally moving from within your body, through the skin, to join with the impure, chemically treated, or salty water around you. Osmosis is an important part of the world’s natural life cycle—for example, it’s also how plants draw water up into their roots from the soil.
Reverse osmosis is, logically, the opposite of this process. It’s using pressure to push water through a membrane or filter that will remove most of the dissolved chemicals and minerals, natural compounds, and organic and non-organic matter. It essentially forces it from an area of high dissolved material into a purer, cleaner state of little to no dissolved material at all. Reverse osmosis has been shown to result in water that is distinctly cleaner in taste and healthier to drink than unfiltered water.
What Are the Health Benefits of Water from Reverse Osmosis Systems?
Reverse osmosis systems help to filter dissolved salt ions, particulate matter, and bacteria out of the water you and your family drink. It can also contribute to filtering out heavy metal contaminants, like lead or arsenic, that may be present in community water. Drinking water with harmful contaminants has been linked to problems with blood pressure, fertility, skin appearance, and the increased creation of cancer-causing compounds. Reverse osmosis ensures that most of these harmful contaminants are removed, giving your family the healthiest drinking water possible.
What Are the Stages of Reverse Osmosis Systems?
Reverse osmosis systems are generally divided up into three stages: pre-filtration, reverse osmosis, and storage.
- Pre-filtration: Before entering the reverse osmosis chamber, water is passed through a series of other filters designed to capture larger particles and contaminants that could clog the membrane.
- Reverse osmosis: The water is pushed through a semipermeable membrane with holes too small to be seen with the naked eye. These holes are large enough for water molecules to pass through, but too small for heavy metals and other dissolved minerals, which are “caught” by the filter.
- Storage: The filtered water is stored to ensure you have access to the cleanest possible water whenever you need it.
How Do I Get Reverse Osmosis Water in My Home?
Contact Simply Green Home Services today to speak with one of our experts about upgrading your home with clean, filtered water. We offer a variety of reverse osmosis and other water filtration systems to choose from. With Simply Green Home Services, you’ll get all the assistance you need, as well as access to affordable monthly payments and ongoing maintenance with our flexible lease-to-own programs.
