Water Filter vs. Reverse Osmosis
Are you curious about the differences between how water filters and reverse osmosis systems function? While both types of systems are used to reduce the number of contaminants in a sample of water, they function in quite different ways.
What is Reverse Osmosis?
Reverse osmosis (RO) systems use reverse osmosis to dramatically reduce the number of contaminants in water. We will now discuss how reverse osmosis works and what it is.
To fully understand the reverse osmosis process, it is helpful to start with osmosis. Osmosis is a natural process that is critical for our lives and the lives of all living creatures around us. Osmosis is the movement of a solvent through a membrane from a solution with a low concentration of solute to a solution with a high concentration of solute.
The solvent or fluid that passes through a membrane in osmosis is usually water. The membrane must be semi-permeable, meaning it allows some molecules to pass but not others. Solutes are any dissolved substances in the solution on either side of the membrane. Osmosis continues until the solutions on both sides of the membrane reach a state of equilibrium.
Reverse osmosis turns this process completely around. In reverse osmosis, you have a solution with a high concentration of solutes forced across a semi-permeable membrane to a solution with a low concentration of solutes. In reverse osmosis, an external force greater than the osmotic pressure is required to force a solvent across a membrane.
Reverse osmosis is used primarily to reduce the number of contaminants in water, so let’s put the reverse osmosis process in real terms. With an RO system, you start with water that contains a higher number of contaminants. You force that water through a semi-permeable membrane that allows the solvent (water) to pass through the membrane but not the other contaminants or solutes that are in the original solution. On the other side of the membrane is the solution with a low number of solutes, or rather water with substantially fewer contaminants.
What is a Water Filter?
There are various types of water filters but all are devices that contain one or more filtration media to reduce the number of contaminants in water. One thing you might have noticed at this point is that reverse osmosis seems to filter contaminants from water. Reverse osmosis is a common type of water filtration, so what exactly are clean water filters and how are they different?
It’s important to understand what to look for in a water filter since they use a different type of filtration method to reduce the number of contaminants in water. They also reduce different types of contaminants than an RO system does in some cases. The most common type of filtration media found in water filters is activated carbon.