Is it ok to use RO water in my ultrasonic humidifier? I’ve read regular water leaves plants looking dusty looking. Is distilled water better than RO water?
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My RO water from Walmart generally reads 5 or 6 PPM. Where my tap water reads 200 to 300 PPM
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RO is fine to use, tap water is full of minerals that will leave a film all over everything. Distilled is fine as well and maybe cheaper idk.
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I ran my humidifier 24 hours a day during the winter. During veg I ran 480 gallons through it. I only used tap water. Buying distilled or RO can really add up.
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Two gallons of RO a day @ 40 cents/gal for one year is more than enough to pay for an in home RO filter. Setup a float in a drum for a large reservoir, maybe an RV pump on a transformer to pump it out whenever you open the valve… been working that way for me for a few years now. 
Oh, and RO and distilled water are interchangeable.
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Thanks guys. RO water at Walmart (refills and your own 5 gallon jug) is about .39 gallon. Distilled is .99 gallon. The only trouble with installing your own OR system is lots of wasted water go down the drain. Water reverses in the system to flush out your filters periodically and all that water gos down the drain.
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True, it’s about a 3:1 ratio, but that happens whether it’s filtered at home, or in the store.
700 gal a year (the ~2g/day scenario) at a 3:1 ratio would be 2800 gallons.
Let’s say a well pump could only pump 1g/min running non stop, taking 1000w of power.
2800 minutes is ~47 hours, or 47 kw. At 15 cents a kw, that’s only $7 a year in electricity. Add in a couple bucks if you’re running a lift pump for discharge. (By comparison, I have to run 3 lawn sprinklers at once to keep my well from cycling when watering my lawn, so way more than a gal/min. The example is using extremes just for demonstration purposes.)
Now if it’s city water, I’m not sure how that works. So cost could be an issue, I don’t know.
RO discharge water can also go towards watering a garden, or some other uses if there is one. It doesn’t have to be dumped down the drain, but that’s the easiest of course.
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@Thatbaldguy you must have pretty soft water in your area. Here, we have 21 grains of hardness. If I tried that, I would get a white film inside my tent in about a week, I suspect. I sue a 5gal bucket to offgas my tap water with an airstone and, the whole top of the Blue bucket above the water line is white from lime in the water.
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My area for growing is 14’ x 6’ but I do have a little build up on the poly I use. Every few grows I can change the poly and basically have a new, clean room. ADVANTAGE!
Tucked into the basement utility room. Behind tje poly is my grow space. 18" fan, dehumidifier with intake attached to the poly wall so the unit is outside the grow space, my wife keeps the house at 68° so I run a small space heater to maintain temps, humidifier in the winter, dehumidifier in the summer. Lights are adjustable from the ceiling. 2 inline 190 cfm exhaust fans on 6" flex line reduced to 4" at the end to a dryer vent to the outside world. Everything completely manually controlled. Easy to take down and change any component. I like big plants and this setup allows for it.
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