Who Gives A Fish Forums

I'm really happy with my RO unit in my aquarium work area, behind the tanks, but I've been dealing with a couple of issues. It runs a lot of water and last summer it made my copper lines for the house sweat - not what I wanted. I insulated all the house pipes about six months ago, so that problem's been taken care of. Now, I'm going through softer salt like crazy, which got me thinking - our water's so hard that the whole house is set up to go through the softener, so my RO unit's fed with soft water and all the filter rinse water is soft too. I've decided to try something new - I've installed a 1/4 inch saddle valve on the water line coming in, before the softener, and I've got two big rolls of plastic tubing, one 1/4 inch for the water line and 1 roll of 3/8 inch for wear protection. I'm hoping that'll create a small air gap to protect this line from sweating. I've also got some push lock fittings and the line's currently going to a tank on the opposite side of the house - it's a hard water tank with live bearers and rainbows. Today I'll start bending in less sodium hard water, and next week, when my in-line shut off valves come in, I'll start feeding my RO unit with unsoftened hard water. If the double line works to control the pipe sweating, I'll finally be happy with my water. Once I've got hard water going to my RO unit, I'll have good unsoftened well water to blend into the RO for my shrimp tanks and any live bearing breeding tanks I set up in my work area - I can almost taste that would Ron and calcium well water.