. Do RO harvesting at home and share your experience.
Answers
Answer:
In industrial settings, RO is often used to remove total dissolved salts (TDS) from industrial wastewater or treated industrial wastewater and yield permeate with relatively low TDS concentrations.
While RO is an effective method for handling wastewater, what to do with the concentrate or reject water (typically as much as 20-50% of the RO feed water volume) can be an issue. Specifically, the high salinity in RO reject / RO concentrate can make it prohibitive for discharge to a local sewer facility. Hauling the wastewater to a treatment facility can also be prohibitively expensive.
ENCON Mechanical Vapor Compression (MVC) Evaporators and ENCON Thermal Evaporators have proven to be effective technologies for dewatering RO reject / RO concentrate waste streams. In brief, evaporation is a time-tested methodology for reducing the water portion of water-based waste. The evaporator converts the water portion of water-based waste to water vapor, while leaving the higher boiling contaminants behind. This greatly minimizes the amount of waste that needs to be hauled off-site.
Evaporation technology has always been more “hands off” than other wastewater treatment methodologies resulting in a dramatically lower labor cost. Evaporation technology can handle a much wider range of waste streams compared to membranes and traditional physical / chemical treatment methodologies. Finally, evaporation does a much better job of concentrating waste streams compared to other methods, thereby yielding a lower disposal volume and cost.