Is RODI water safe to drink?

[Reefahholic]

Would it be unhealthy because it's filtered too much?

Last question...can you use this in an iron since all the metals are filtered out.

I wanna make coffee with it or use in baby bottles.

 

[ScottR]

DI is not safe

 

[LAReefer4Life]

DI is not safe

+1 ^ Exactly

 

[NemHost]

It’s most likely safe to drink but I would not

 

[rushbattle]

DI is not safe

+1 ^ Exactly

Can you cite any articles that support this claim?

 

[robbyg]

It’s not safe to drink. This has been bought up many times in the past. If you have doubts I suggest watering a potted plant with rodi water for a week and watch it die. It’s corrosive in nature just dying to bind onto something like your cell walls and start stripping them.
Away from your body, let us know how it turns out.

 

[Opus]

The only thing that makes RODI unsafe to drink is that DI material is not food grade. That is why water drinking kits always link off before the DI filter.

 

[Scrubber_steve]

There have been some studies – including from the World Health Organization – that indicate that drinking deionized water may cause people to urinate more and eliminate more electrolytes from the body. If you're getting enough vitamins and minerals from the foods that you eat each day, however, this is unlikely to be a problem. Deionized water may also have a lower pH than most tap water, but it's typically not highly acidic. Most carbonated sodas, for example, have a very low pH, much lower than DI water.

In the short term, drinking deionized water isn't going to cause any immediate health effects for the vast majority of people. There is some small risk that there could be a residual traces of the deionizing resins still in the water, but this is unlikely. In fact, the crew members on submarines drink distilled water regularly, which also has all of the minerals removed, and they appear to experience no long term health effects.

Can You Drink Deionized Water?

There is a lot of controversy over whether drinking deionized water is dangerous or not, particularly because of its demineralized nature. But can you drink deionized water safely? The short answer is yes, although there is more to the issue.

www.uswatersystems.com

 

[AdamB]

Agreed . DI resin is not safe. Literature is is stated on product listing .

 

[Dkeller_nc]

Sorry folks, but drinking deionized water in and of itself will not hurt you in the slightest. The idea behind this is an inappropriate extrapolation from laboratory science. Extremely pure water has a large capacity to dissolve ions from various containers that it's put into, which is why if one puts 18.3 megaohm laboratory grade water into a glass vessel, the resistivity will quickly drop into the 0.5-1.0 megaohm range. That's partly from the adsorption of CO2 in the air, but also dissolution of sodium and silica from the vessel walls itself. And if you keep highly pure water in a 316 stainless steel system that's not "passivated", you will get corrosion of the steel walls as a very tiny amount of it dissolves into the water (this is called "rouging").

These effects have led some to inappropriately assume that highly purified water is "corrosive" and that it will remove minerals from your body as they dissolve into the water if you drink it. There is a rather serious logical problem with this assertion, which is that your stomach contains a massive amount of electrolytes compared to what is required to make highly pure water into "normal" water. It's true that if you only drank highly purified water and your food was deficient in minerals, then at some point you might develop a mineral deficiency. This is often cited as evidence that drinking highly purified water is "bad for you". What alarmist websites that espouse this dreck aren't telling you is that you would likely develop the same mineral deficiency regardless of whether you were drinking "normal" water or highly purified water. And for the average person in developed countries, the vast majority of your daily mineral intact is from food, not water.

However, there are several reasons not to drink water from your average hobbyist's RODI system, though it has nothing to do with the water that's produced being inherently bad for you. The first is taste - a lot of what we perceive to be "good tasting water" comes from the minerals that are in it. Highly purified water tends to taste "flat". This is why, btw, that bottled water companies use RODI systems to purify the municipal sources of water that they use, then add sodium, calcium and magnesium salts back into it before they bottle it. The second reason not to drink hobbyist-produced RODI water has to do with sterility. Municipal sources add chlorine/chloramine to water for a reason, and that's to prevent you from getting a bunch of live pseudomonas and escherichia (among other genuses) when you get a drink of water from the sink. In a hobbyist's RODI system, the carbon blocks remove the chlorine/chloramine, so the rest of the system downstream from the pretreatment stage can definitely grow several types of problematic bacteria that you wouldn't want to drink.

That's why RODI systems that are used for manufacturing beverage products have 2 additional controls in the system, which are UV sterilization and ultrafiltration. These systems are also regularly sterilized with peroxide-based sterilants to prevent the growth of biofilms.

Bottom line - if you want to use RODI in an application were it will be heated/boiled, there's no reason not to. But don't drink it straight from your RODI system without adding in some additional components to ensure its microbiological safety.

 

[WVNed]

The dangers of dihydrogen monoxide

 

[AllSignsPointToFish]

I wouldn't drink the DI water, but I will tell you that RO water is safe to drink and is delicious. In fact, it ruined me on drinking almost any other type of water. The cold RO water was so refreshing on a hot summer day after yardwork, but when I went to my mom's house or any hotel where I had to drink tap water, I could actually taste the hardness/saltiness of the tap water. When I had household RO drinking water available, I actually felt like I had to drink less water for my thirst to be quenched. Of course, these are just anecdotal stories from my own personal experiences.

The other nice thing about RO water was that the quality was consistent. I lived in Dallas for a time, and during the summer the lake water used for drinking would become undrinkable due to algae blooms in the reservoir. After installation of RO for drinking water, this was no longer an issue.

A lot of purified drinking water is RO water. Deionization is a separate process that produces water that is not fit for human consumption, but it would be fine to use in cleaning applications.

 

[ReefLab]

It’s not safe to drink. This has been bought up many times in the past. If you have doubts I suggest watering a potted plant with rodi water for a week and watch it die. It’s corrosive in nature just dying to bind onto something like your cell walls and start stripping them.
Away from your body, let us know how it turns out.

Yikes. humans do not have cell walls. and our lipid bilayers are lipids so water will not interact with it directly.

The issue you run into with RODI water is it has an extremely low water activity. This creates a hypotonic environment and turgor pressure within our cells that we cannot deal with. It would be better just to drink water coming out after the carbon/sediment filter and use ro/di just for the tank.
To address the above comment with plants, plants love being in a hypotonic environment because the turgor pressure within their cells creates rigidity that keeps them upright. This is possible because they do have cell walls.

 

[ReefHomieJon]

The only thing that makes RODI unsafe to drink is that DI material is not food grade. That is why water drinking kits always link off before the DI filter.

Then y the heck do our fish and corals use it lol funny how it’s good for them

 

[LARedstickreefer]

I drink RO water directly from the filter. I don’t drink RODI because it taste like plastic. If drinking any of this (RODI or RO) is unsafe because of chlorine removal and bacteria growth, how do those commercial filter that go on your sink work? Don’t they use carbon as well?

 

[AllSignsPointToFish]

I drink RO water directly from the filter. I don’t drink RODI because it taste like plastic. If drinking any of this (RODI or RO) is unsafe because of chlorine removal and bacteria growth, how do those commercial filter that go on your sink work? Don’t they use carbon as well?

Water treatment with activated carbon is not the same as reverse osmosis. Whereas activated carbon will remove chlorine and dissolved organics, the reverse osmosis membrane actually rejects dissolve salts and other minerals.

 

[LARedstickreefer]

Water treatment with activated carbon is not the same as reverse osmosis. Whereas activated carbon will remove chlorine and dissolved organics, the reverse osmosis membrane actually rejects dissolve salts and other minerals.

Yeah I get that, I mean how do they differ from our Rodi systems as far as bacteria go?

There was a comment made that our systems remove chorine thus allowing water downstream to become hazardous for drinking.

Those Brita pitchers and sink contraptions also use carbon, no? Don’t they remove bacteria killing chlorine as well?

 

[AllSignsPointToFish]

Yeah I get that, I mean how do they differ from our Rodi systems as far as bacteria go?

There was a comment made that our systems remove chorine thus allowing water downstream to become hazardous for drinking.

Those Brita pitchers and sink contraptions also use carbon, no? Don’t they remove bacteria killing chlorine as well?

Yes, activated carbon in RO/DI does remove chlorine as the chlorine would damage the RO membrane.

However, most household systems are not stagnant long enough for bacterial growth to occur in any meaningful manner. Add to that the fact that there would be very few nutrients for the bacteria to consume (since dissolved organics are also removed), and you've got a situation where growth is slow if it happens at all.

RO systems can actually remove bacteria, viruses and cysts from the water since the pore diameters in the membrane are so small.

 

[LARedstickreefer]

Yes, activated carbon in RO/DI do remove chlorine as the chlorine would damage the RO membrane.

However, most household systems are not stagnant long enough for bacterial growth to occur in any meaningful manner. Add to that the fact that there would be very few nutrients for the bacteria to consume (since dissolved organics are also removed), and you've got a situation where growth is slow if it happens at all.

RO systems can actually remove bacteria, viruses and cysts from the water since the pore diameters in the membrane are so small.

Good. Didn’t want to have to stop drinking my RO water. My wife and I go through 10g or so per week.

 

[AllSignsPointToFish]

Good. Didn’t want to have to stop drinking my RO water. My wife and I go through 10g or so per week.

I loved it when I had it in my house. Honestly, the only reason I don't have it now is that I don't have any room under my kitchen sink for the filter/membrane housings and the tank.