can you drink RO/DI?

[sphelps]

Originally Posted by daniella3d

Guys, it's only a problem if you sweat a lot and you drink RODI water, then you will lose minerals (sweat is salty!) and if you don't compensate that loss with some electrolite (like in Gatorade) then you can get water poisoning.

"Any activity or situation that promotes heavy sweating can lead to water intoxication when water is consumed to replace lost fluids. Persons working in extreme heat and/or humidity for long periods must take care to drink and eat in ways that help to maintain electrolyte balance."

Personaly I would not drink RODI water but I drink filtered water with a filter that remove all the toxic stuff but not all of the good stuff.

Best water I ever drink was from some lakes in the Sierra Nevada in California, 10,000 feet elevation and filtered with a ceramic filter for hiking. That tasted awesome!

Actually the same rules apply to tap water as well. If you want to avoid this you should drink bottled mineral water. Tap water is not mineral water, it may have minerals but they aren't necessarily the correct type.

IMO you shouldn't drink tap water in most cities, some are OK depending on how close you are to the source but most not so good. When I lived in Saskatoon a study showed many areas to have 3-5 times the allowable lead content in the tap water. Calgary claims they add fluoride to help your teeth while the dentist makes sure you don't swallow any fluoride during the routine treatment Then there's the chloramine with is what is now used instead of chlorine since chlorine breaks down two easily. Chloramine is ammonia bonded and doesn't break down, all those aerators on your taps are now fairly useless.
For the amount of so called "good" things in city water there are too many bad things for me personally. In Calgary and Saskatoon the source of the water comes from rivers, the city advices the water from the rivers are safe to drink but don't eat any fish from them.
Many things within the water have been linked to cancer as well which we all know is a very common disease while most of us have never heard of water poisoning due to a lack of minerals.

I currently drink RO water but previously it was RODI which can taste funny to some but it's harmless. If you like the taste then go nuts, if not try a final taste and odor filter on your system or remove the DI. You can also tee into your filter right before the DI stage and use that for drinking (just make sure the storage tank is also tee'd in before the DI) and leave the output from the DI strictly for the aquarium.
It's sometimes recommended not to drink DI water because DI alone does not remove bacteria or pathogens. When it's added to a RO system this is no longer a concern.

[mike31154]

Since getting my RODI system a couple of years ago, I've been using RO for drinking, making coffee & tea etc. It's great. When I go play soccer, I use RO water to mix up some Gatorade, so I reckon that replaces many of the minerals I may lose working up a sweat, it's an electrolyte after all. sphelps brings up some very valid points in his post. Often general statements made by the so called health experts make their way into our mindset and we don't bother checking our local sources or conditions, or use some common sense in relation to what these health experts are feeding us. I've checked the water reports provided by the city of Vernon on a number of occasions to determine what's actually in the water they're sending down the pipe to my home. It's drinkable according to current standards and hopefully the folks keeping an eye on this regularly are doing their job. But remember Walkerton and don't take things for granted. We're ahead of the game with our RODI systems so why not use RO water for our daily consumption? It's the same as bottled and nutritional/mineral requirements are easily supplemented with the plethora of health products marketed to us these days. It's the same principle we use for our marine tanks, use water stripped of everything, mix with salt and supplement minerals & trace elements to keep our critters healthy.

PS. If you have a spare CO2 bottle kicking around, get a tire valve, integrate it into the cap of a two liter plastic pop bottle and you can make your own carbonated water or even soft drinks with RO water. Tastes awesome. I snagged a used 10lb tank some time ago and make my own bubbly. Don't use a calcium reactor so the CO2 bottle is a dedicated pop machine.

[mark]

I love the internet, where else can you put common sense aside and keep a myth going around and around.

[randallino]

Too much minerals are a bad thing...kidney, bladder stones. Ouch!

[mike31154]

Originally Posted by mark

I love the internet, where else can you put common sense aside and keep a myth going around and around.

Indeed, but on the pro side, we now also have easy access to things like water reports which would have been a bit of a chore before the interweb.

[Zoaelite]

Originally Posted by Aquaria

well in my interweb searches iv found that drinking it can acually effect your intakes of certin vitamins that come in water since the water is stripped of everything. im sure u could offset this by taking vitamins and drinking milk though. this is all based off of internet reading :P but IMHO, no you shouldent drink it

Stop believing stuff on the internet (Haha Iroonnnyyyy), there are no vitamins in tap water. Vitamins are organic compounds produced biologically, you don't find them in tap water only in them in the food you eat. This myth about having to drink tap water to get your mineral content/ vitamins is unbelievably wrong.

A single 50g serving of Swiss cheese contains 480 mg of Calcium which equates to about 1.19 e-2 mols of calcium or 7,211976048000000000000 molecules (7.2e21). Calgary water has 200 ppm of dissolved minerals (Including Calcium, Magnesium, sodium...). 50 mL of water is 50g, at 200 ppm 0.02% of that is minerals or 0.01g, this means that there are about 2.49e-4 mols of minerals or 1.49e20 molecules (using the heavier weight of calcium to calculate).

What does it all mean Basil!
Well for every 1 calcium molecule in cheese there are 0.02 dissolved hardness molecules in water (again this includes Calcium, Magnesium, Sodium, Potassium...). So you would have to drink 2.5L of water to match 50g of cheese and I'm still comparing apples to oranges here as that's pure calcium in cheese and an accumulation of all hardness minerals in water.

The major advantage to drinking RO water is that you know it's ONLY water, a proper RO unit will filter out not only all the minerals but containment such as chlorine, chloramine, VOC, bacteria, viruses, lead and anything else your worried about.

Don't listen to me though, my opinion is bias as I used to sell these units. .

[BC564]

ok...Calgary does not use Chloramine to disinfect.......

[sphelps]

Originally Posted by BC564

ok...Calgary does not use Chloramine to disinfect.......

Correct but many other cities do, including (as far I know) Edmonton and Saskatoon.

[freezetyle]

Originally Posted by darb

be careful not to drink too much H2O, you can get intoxicated from water also ...

define too much water. I shoot to drink about a gallon of water a day and i know many athletes that will drink up to two gallons per day. Most people do not drink enough fluids as it is. coffee, pop, caffeinated drinks, booze, etc. do not count of course

[Aquaria]

first off ill say i don't believe everything i read and second there is NO proof as to it being good OR bad thats why i said IMHO i wouldn't drink it. there still to much debate as to it being healthy or not for me to drink it, i want some concrete evidence before i pour a glass. you say that theres no evidence that its bad well i say theres no evidence that its good either again IMHO