Does reverse osmosis remove good minerals from my water?
Does reverse osmosis remove all good minerals from my water? We get this question all the time. And most times it comes from people who have a water softener in the home. And that makes it a pointless question. Most of the “Good Minerals” people are talking about are actually calcium and magnesium. In other words: Hardness. So if you make the water soft by using a water softener. Then the minerals are already gone before the reverse osmosis system comes into play.
Water softeners remove minerals anyway
In this case the answer is NO. The reverse osmosis system does NOT remove minerals, good or otherwise. But it is removing the harmful sodium left behind by the softening process. And if that water is very hard. You simply must soften the water. Then you must either drink bottled water, or use reverse osmosis. Now that it is being reported by all national news agencies that all bottled water has micro plastics in them. Using reverse osmosis to purify the water after softening, becomes a no brainer. So a reverse osmosis unit becomes even more essential.
Is it ok to drink the water from a water softener?
Normally, the answer is NO. It is not good. A water softener replaces the hardness from the water with an equal or greater amount of sodium from the salt being used. It is a scientific term called a one for one ionic exchange. So if the water has a lot of hardness. Then when you replace it. You will have a lot of sodium. And sodium is far worse for most people’s health than hardness. Which is simply calcium and magnesium for the most part.
Be leery of softener sales people who say drinking softened water is ok
Many in-home companies will down play the role of drinking sodium. We simply advise customers who have a softener already. To take a sample of raw water before the softener. And a sample after the softener and see what the results are for sodium. The testing won’t lie. The EPA safe drinking water standard is a maximum of 30 PPM sodium. And the American Heart Association is a maximum of 20 PPM. Even if you replace a moderate amount of hardness with a water softener. The sodium number will likely jump into the hundreds in most cases. If it is really hard water you are softening. It can be many hundreds of PPMs of sodium.
You usually only get about 1% of daily minerals from drinking water
As for the good minerals we need each day. What food we eat gives us what we need to satisfy our daily requirements. Many people also take a daily vitamin. You would have to drink an awful lot of water to get your daily intake of these minerals. Also, as we stated before. When the water goes through a water softener and is softened. The hardness (Minerals) is removed anyway. The softener will remove the hardness from the water and give you all the luxuries of soft water but sodium is added to the drinking water. Thus the need for a reverse osmosis drinking water system. Which also removes a great deal of other contaminants from your drinking water.
For those who want these minerals in their water we do offer a mineral replacement cartridge to add those missing minerals back into the water. It is very inexpensive to add to the water line after the reverse osmosis unit. Some customers insist on this cartridge. And we understand that. The customer will have some of the purest water possible for drinking and cooking water and this is all done at a fraction of the cost of bottled water.
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