What Is Reverse Osmosis?

In Canada, we are lucky enough to be able to take clean water for granted. Here, it’s abundant and cheap. Even though we might take it for granted sometimes, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take a minute every once in a while to appreciate the science behind our clean water. The more you learn about how we get our water and how we keep it clean, the better decisions you’ll be able to make about your own home’s water sources and water filtration systems.

At Hometech Environmental Ltd. we’re water purification experts. We like to let our customers in the Aurora area know about the latest and greatest water filtration technologies that are available to them, technologies such as reverse osmosis.

How does reverse osmosis make clean water?

Reverse osmosis (sometimes referred to simply as RO) is a technology that uses the natural force of osmosis to filter pathogens, dirt, and other nasty stuff out of water, rendering it clean of any impurities. The term osmosis, of course, describes the tendency of compounds that have been dissolved in water to move through semipermeable membranes. In general, things that have been dissolved in water like to spread out more or less evenly as they dissolve—even if that means going through a membrane when they can. If you dissolve salt or sugar in water, for example, they change from little but still visible granules into even smaller particles that are spread throughout the water and that can’t really be seen by the naked eye. What reverse osmosis does is essentially to put the natural process of particles tending to move through certain kinds of membrane in reverse, pushing clean water through a membrane and keeping tiny particles like bacteria on the other side.

How easy is it to have purified water in my home?

If you get your water from a municipal treatment plant, it’s almost certainly perfectly fine to drink. At the same time, many people prefer to have even more control over their drinking water. Luckily, there are many options available to you to have reverse osmosis technology in your home. There are additions you can put in your plumbing that automatically run water through a filtration system or you can find convenient water dispensers separate from your plumbing system that you can run water through if you want to be particularly certain that it’s clean.

If you’re interested in learning more about water purification systems and how easy they are to add to your home’s water dispensing systems, contact us at Hometech Environmental Ltd. at our Aurora location today.