I have talked a lot about the importance of having clean water for health reasons. Most of it however has been applicable to humans. What about dogs? Is RO water good for them or does it do more harm than good? Let’s find out, shall we?
Dangers of drinking unfiltered water
After much research, it is interesting to note that there are similar health effects on dogs if they drink unfiltered water for the long term. For example, one harmful chemical is fluoride and waters in the US is known to be heavily fluoridated. If consumed over long periods of time, it can lead to bone problems in both dogs and humans! To think, this is just the effect of one chemical. Do you know that there are over 60,000 chemicals in our waters and as little as 1% is being tested? If you are a dog owner and is not aware of this, I hope you can understand why there are folks like me who take such efforts to make sure my family, especially our little princesses, are drinking filtered clean water.
How about normal water filters?
If you are convinced that your dog should be drinking filtered water, you might be curious as to the effectiveness of normal water filter. Unfortunately, these are found to be capable of removing 10 to 15 chemical types and not all of them. Worse of all, some of them merely reduced the amount and are not able to remove them completely. The end result is that water will taste a bit better and sediments will be removed. However, other harmful chemicals will still remain in the water.
What can reverse osmosis do?
Reverse osmosis systems have very effective water filtering capabilities, which is why I bought them in the future place. Currently, most home reverse osmosis systems have 4 to 5 stage filters, although there are now 6 or even 7 stage RO systems. Each stage is responsible for removing certain chemical and sediments. If you want to more, I encourage you to read my article on the difference between 4th vs 5th stage reverse osmosis systems. In that article, I outlined what each of the filtering will do and will give first time readers a good overview of how RO systems are much better than your average water filter systems.
For dog owners who are more data driven, there is a scientific way to test how effective a reverse osmosis system really is. It is a measure called TDS (Total Dissolved Solids) and tells you how much containment there is in the water. Usually, the TDS of tap water is around 200-400 pps, depending on which city you are living in. After purification by my Home Master Ro system, my filtered water’s TDS reading is now only 10 ppm. That shows how much TDS has been removed!
Downside of reverse osmosis water for dogs
Since a dog is almost part of the family, you might be worried about any potential side effects. I shall be honest and say there is at least one: the removal of chemicals that are actually good for the dogs’ body. This is unavoidable since the system basically removes everything in the water. For more detailed reading on this issue, check out my article : is reverse osmosis good or bad for you.
Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem. You can add back those useful chemical via a process called remineralization. Some RO system such as the one I used, have remineralization as the last stage of the filtering process, meaning these healthy chemicals have already been added back to the water before it reaches me. Other RO systems might need to add a remineralization filter to the set up before you can enjoy this benefit. Regardless of which option you choose, they will eliminate this problem completely.
Conclusion
To answer this question “is reverse osmosis water good for dogs”, my answer is a strong yes. It reduces the harmful effects of unwanted containment in water and therefore will be beneficial to dogs everywhere.