RO water tastes bad and has its own waste stream you have to deal with. Remember water wants to have minerals in it. RO removes everything so water will want to re-minaralize itself. Yes you can use re-minaralizing filters but that adds xomplexity. So it will take minerals from whatever it touches. It will corrode brass and copper fittings for example. Bio fowling has been mentioned.
Outside of espresso machines and beer making and industrial processes, I've never understood the RO craze. The water tastes "empty" to me. I run cocktail bars and we make/break down our own fancy clear block ice in a Clinebell machine. We are nerdy about water. We run sediment filters into a dual wash back activated carbon and catalytic carbon tanks. Catalytic is for the chloramine in the muni supply. Our water tastes really good and our ice is clear.
IMHO RO is not practical or even desirable for vehicle use. My scheme is: sediment then back-flushable hollow membrane filter to tank. Small dose of chlorine into tank. Carbon filter at sink or other drinking POU. This keeps the bio nasties tamped down in the tanks. At some point I want to add UV into the mix post filter for viral loads.
I keep alum or aluminum hydroxy chloride (AHC) for flocculation should I need to pull a small 5g load of brackish or muddy water into the tank in a pinch, an old river runners trick. Scoop up river water with a 5 gallon bucket, add your diluted alum or AHC, stir good and wait 20 minutes then filter clear water off the top. Has come in really handy on the Colorado Plateau. I've used alum, which is available at most grocery stores in powdered form in the canning section for jellies, for decades to great effect. I get my AHC from
THIS GUY. A little goes a loooong way.
watersafepro.com
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
www.highwaterfilters.com
sawyer.com
