It’s time to say goodbye. It’s been a long time coming. This relationship is wasteful. There are better options out there. It’s true. We’re finally kicking the bottled water habit and switching to a reverse osmosis system (ROS). At any given time over the past year, you could find 5-10 empty bottles of Dasani or Aquafina lying around the house. On our dressers, on the kitchen counters, on the bathroom sinks. Everywhere. On top of our water bottle consumption, we own a Brita filter. It’s okay, but it’s not as good as bottled. We’re getting rid of Brita. I’ll let Vaughn take it from here…
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Now, since this is a commercially available product (we bought it at Lowes a while back) with its own set of instructions, I’m not going to get to detailed with the how-to instructions. I thought it would be helpful if we showed you what’s involved.
Since these units are installed either in a basement or underneath a sink, we’ll start there. We picked our sink.
Then we cleaned out underneath our sink. I’ll need the room.
The ROS takes up a good amount of space. We’ll reorganize it once we’ve finished. I’ll also need to turn off the water supply valves.
The ROS takes the water right from the cold water line under the sink. I added a tee between the water supply hose and the faucet pipe.
To add the actual ROS faucet we have the option of either using the existing hole for the sprayer or drilling another hole. Since we do actually use the sprayer once in a while, we drilled another hole.
It’s not easy to drill a hole through 1/16″ thick stainless steel, but if you go slow and use the right bit, it’s doable.
You can see the added pipe in the photo below along with the filter assembly and the reservoir tank. It’s all a part of the system. Not exactly sure how it works. Just trust it.
The water lines are just flexible tubes that basically get pressed into connections. It’s really, really easy to make those connections.
The faucet gets bolted to the sink top. We picked a chrome unit, despite the fact that our sink is stainless steel and our main faucet is brushed nickel. Weird right? Well, we’re probably going to be getting granite or some other solid surface in the next few years and we’re going to be switching the sink and maybe the faucet too. Besides, the main faucet doesn’t even match the sink anyway. We don’t mind the clashing in the meantime.
How’s it taste? Great! Well… as great as water can taste. It doesn’t have any odor whatsoever.
How do you drink your water? Do you take it bottled or filtered?
Tap water here is actually pretty good, so we drink it unfiltered. Good for you for kicking the bottled water habit and installing this system!
I'm hoping to get a whole house filtration system in our house at some point, but for interests sake, what was the cost of this system?
It retails for around $140, but whole house filters, which are different from reverse osmosis systems are much cheaper.
Glad to hear you like the ROS system and it wasn't too hard to install! I've always drank from the tap (in NJ, DE, and now NY). Usually, I only get bottled water for convenience (ie. I'll be out all day and don't want to worry about carrying a nalgene around).
Snazzy!! I'm glad to hear positive things about your new system. We either drink bottled water or filtered from the fridge. And we're the same way with the bottles hanging out all over the house!
Good for you for switching from bottled water!! We have a big brita filter and we use that for the most part. Drinking tap water doesn't bother me but Shayne is not a fan.
I use bottled (refilled) water to save 'dirtying' cups. When the water is fridge cold, I can't taste any impurities (I'm sure there are some). If it gets to room temp, it's another story. Thanks for the post
I think we\’re going to be refilling glasses as well. It\’s a smart idea.
We use a Brita filter, but this seems so much more convenient and tasty.
That's pretty sweet! We've got the whole house filter + one in the fridge and another one under the sink (but I don't think it's a ROS). Regardless, the water tastes pretty good.
Good for you on dumping the bottled water and going with reverse osmosis. Reverse osmosis is by far the best filtration system out there.