This project was many months in the making. We had an upstairs bath redone
and the Ca/Fe/Mg/Mn in our water was ruining the grout. Our water is very hard
and softened will make the tonicity so high it would be instant deaf for
orchids and slow death for everything else. We have an under-sink RO unit for
our Phrag orchids but that can not make enough for all the plants. Designing
something and acquiring the parts took awhile. Lucky our plumber has a sense
of humor and actually shows up. Marnie says (for good reasons) I should
largely restrict myself to "theoretical plumbing." I wanted a charcoal
pre-filter to protect the ion exchange resin and a pre-pre filter to get rid of
the abundant particulates in our water and protect the more expensive charcoal
filter. I drew the line on a pre-pre-pre filter. I had to special order an on
demand heater factory set at 75 deg for the orchids after speaking with tech
support. Finding 2 Triflow faucets, one for upstairs and one for down
stairs was no piece of cake. They were 1200 bucks a pop at Rohls for some
monstrosity we did not want but a bit over 100 direct order from a factory in
China. Actually build quality of the stainless items was quite good. One
channel has no contact with metal--prolly a good thing for RO water which is
"aggressive." So upstairs we have for the main faucet--hot and cold softened
water and RO and prewarmed filtered but unsoftened for plants/orchids. RO
faucets usually come with air-gap faucets but I got a separate air gap gizmo
that has to be plumbed in for the waste water. I showed the diagram to the
plumber.
Curiously the TDS meter (modified conductivity meter) only went up hair for
the softened water. My Pchem was rusty and did not immediately remember the
divalent cations conduct current much better than Na+--thus though the tonicity
was much higher, conductivity is not a colligative property.
http://zone-10.com/tope2/main.php?g2_itemId=20753
Mike, CTP (certified theoretical plumber)
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