Water Filtration for the Lower Mainland

[BCOrchidGuy]

An R/O unit is a membrane filter to remove most "stuff" from your water. The membrane should be protected from Chlorine so a carbon filter before it is recommended. Alot of people use a De ionizing filter after the R/O unit to polish the water, most R/O units remove about 90% of the "stuff" from the water, but in doing so they produce about 5 gallons of waste water for every gallon of clean water produced.

I think you can run the R/O unit on a seperate plumbed fixture but you probably want to keep the membrane wet so don't let it dry out.

I don't know what most people do but I assume they don't run them 24/7 although I think if I was going to get an R/O unit I would plumb it into my water top off so that I wouldn't have to keep a reservois of water. Kent makes a top off valve that J & L sells for presurized systems and it sells for about $60.

I think replacement is based on gallons of water filtered, or when your TDS meter starts showing an increase of Dissolved solids (which wouldn't help me because our water has no dissolved solids).

I'm not aware of any major difference between the manufacturers so I can't comment on that.

You can buy the stuff to recharge your filter, not sure how much it is or how easy it is.

Yes they should be easy to install, I can't fore see any difficulties.