Waterdrop RO

dfk41

I wondered if anyone had any experience of either this company or their RO products?

https://www.waterdropfilter.co.uk/collections/portable-reverse-osmosis/products/instant-hot-water-reverse-osmosis-system-wd-k19-h

dfk41

I have discovered that they are Chinese made (what is not?) with a big presence in the US. They do have a warehouse in Manchester but everything customer wise is dealt with centrally from overseas. Trustpilot has 12,132 reviews with 4.1 from 5. 8% give 1 star and very poor customer support seems to be the common theme. There is an unhealthy amount of 5 star reviewers who have only written 1 review…..odd hey! That said, all the 1 review reviews seem clustered together within small date ranges. Once you get beyond them there are multiple review folksquite happy

MediumRoastSteam

dfk41 - wouldn’t you be on the safe side and buy an Osmio? Appreciate its more expensive, but at least you know what you are getting. And it’s made in Britain. 😊

Edit: now, if it’s good, £279 (with discount) is a great price! The Osmio Zero is £445!

dfk41

MediumRoastSteam I bought an Osmio in August 2020. Recently it has played up by leaking 3 or 4 times a week. I followed all the instructions they sent and ended up sending it back to them. They could not recreate the leak in the 10 days they had it so I received it back again. After a few weeks of behaving, this week the leaks started again and were larger. I am waiting for an answer from Osmio and do not think it fair to say more than that. I get the impression that Waterdrop are more about drinking ‘healthy’ water than providing an RO solution for coffee enthusiasts but I am presuming RO water is RO water.

I watched this short video where it gives some stats

MediumRoastSteam

dfk41 - that’s very annoying. Hopefully you get sorted out soon. I haven’t watched the video yet. How about the filters performance, cost, availability? Do you know how it compares with the Osmio?

Edit: just watched the video. It does look really good! £70 for a replacement filter, suppose to last 1 year. Not bad at all!

LMSC

MediumRoastSteam It will be good to check the fine print re-water hardness like Osmio drawing 250 ppm for optimum performance.

dfk41

MediumRoastSteam The filters are in the same ball park as OSmio (if you buy one since they discount multiples). One of my reasons for posting was that I am not very good with the technical stuff, but others on here are!

LMSC

Edited

Sorry, wrong post.

DavecUK

dfk41 Also check how much RO water it produces compared to waste, and how often you will be refilling the main tank. The Osmio recycles the water, the osmotic concentration in the tank getting ever higher…a lot of these all in one filters won’t last very long if they do that, so they often route the waste water to a second holding tank…meaning your filling and emptying far more often. (Skuma does this I believe).

dfk41

DavecUK I do not want this to turn into an Osmio v Waterdrop discussion. In the video above around the 1 minute mark they say it makes 3 gallons of purified water for one gallon of waste…..I have absolutely no idea iif that is good, bad or indifferent! They say the filters are good for 1000 gallons

DavecUK

dfk41 Remember it’s US Gallons, about 3.7 litres.

dfk41

dfk41 3 gallons of purified water for one gallon of waste…

Is this an acceptable ratio?

MediumRoastSteam

DavecUK - surely also depends how hard the water is? If this goes by L.A. Water as per video, the. Their water hardness is between 171 and 270 ppm (according to a quick search in Google).

Conversely, out of interest, I checked my tap water with one of those TDS meter and it read 190ppm. Using one of tho fish tank strips, it reads that the KH (carbonate hardness) is 15 German degrees, which translates to approx. 267ppm.

I always thought one translated roughly to the other, but I did t know that not only the difference is so vast, but also that a lower TDS could mean higher KH. Learnt something new!

Uncletits

MediumRoastSteam perhaps talk him into a Zero Water jug?

ManicAsif

dfk41

I must admit, I have little experience of RO setups for drinking water, but having used RO systems for many years for my Reef aquariums - in my mind this is a very good pure/waste ratio!

in basic RO systems (e.g. 50gpd productions - gpd = gallons per day) it is not unusual to have 1:3 ratio (pure/waste) - this improves with higher production RO membranes (e.g 200gpd+) - but even then, an acceptable ratio is 1:1

so they must be doing something ‘funky’ to achieve this 3:1 ratio (recycling possibly, as suggested by Dave)

…but to me, this seems like a very good ratio

also, bear in mind the ‘waste’ water is still quite useful for household use (watering plants, cleaning, etc) so can effectively improve that ratio even further, if you collect and reuse the ‘waste’.

dfk41

Just to give an update. A couple of months on from delivery, and all is well. The unit seems to work without issue. It has a TDS reading on the display panel but when checked against a TDS pen it is a little higher. When the machine is filtering, it is a lot faster than the Osmio was. It offers water to be dispensed on 150, 250, 350, 500 and 750 mls and these are fairly accurate. The water temperature can be set to room, 45, 80 and 95 and it dispenses hot water immediately (it heats it up before it dispenses). I have had no problem in dealing with customer services. Last Amazon Prime day depending when you clicked on the advert the price fluctuated between £229 and £299. At that price range it seems to be a bargain. I am not going to pretend to understand how it works…..it just seems to!

dutchy101

Glad to hear you’re happy with it. Always good to have more RO unit options. Especially when they’re so reasonably priced

dfk41

dutchy101 The only slight inconvenience, is that when I add water to my coffee machine I have to include 10 mls per litre of water with bicarb in. That is no big issue for me. I do think anyone wanting an RO system could save a lot of money on the initial purchase. The single filter is widely available but as of yet, there have been no multi purchase discounts, making them slightly dearer than buying a single cartridge from Osmio.