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RO businesses might just be among the shadiest marketing successes ever. They initially convinced us we are drinking bad water and that the TDS level should be 50 or below and showed us 500+ TDS in our water, convincing us to buy overpriced & >200% margin marked up products.
I just looked up how much it would cost to assemble your own RO with UV treatment, and the total costs would be less than 3-4k tops. And yet, a lot of us pay 12k first, then close to 4k every year. If each household uses 25L per 2 days, that's 375L per month, 4500L per year.
That's 3 rupees per liter. The cans cost 50 rupees now, outside, that's 2 rupees per liter. This is increasing. Most of these RO companies are also increasing rates day after day. AMC charges, repair charges, visiting charges, service charges, testing charges.
On top of this, they advice you to change pre-filter every 3 months, for which they charge 400 per filter (while you can get very high quality filter for 200 outside). Some other filters, they ask you to change every 6 months. They give you at least 5000 worth bill every year.
Their success is in making an essentially free resource commoditized, convincing you that the water with certain essential salts and minerals that you're drinking is bad for your health, and giving you essentially a way to drink approximately close to distilled water.
I was wondering why we shouldn't mix distilled water and our regular water in proportions that would result in desirable TDS values for sustainable health. Has anyone studied the long-term effects of RO water?
In addition to all these, there are some RO brands which go lower and add a breaker of sorts, which adds a bad tasting substance after every few months or so. I have seen this in youtube and have experienced personally with Whirlpool too.
Ever had a similar experience? After few months, your water just starts tasting bad. Not your regular RO taste. Not the regular pipe water taste either. But just bad, chemical tasting water. This means the RO has a chemical breaker of sorts that forces you to change filters.
To conclude, I think we might be the last generation to have had access to clean water and air for free. There are already RO companies selling subscription to clean water instead of selling the device once. Sell it once, customer goes away. Sell it everyday, make them dependent.
