Is this the one - Pureit Mineral RO + UV that is newly launched costing at 12500.00?
I just got myself this purifier. Seems good and responsiveness has been satisfactory so far. Waiting to get it installed.

@mxx; and @petrolhead_chn; I will take a slightly different line. i think I may need to replace by purifier since the control card is erratic, and what I plan to do is, to talk to the swrvice guy about them. He has been dealing with us for over a decade and decide. Quie often he gets me the same price, takes over the maintenance from day one, and just continues. He obviously gets his margin from the distributor. Most major brands are about the same.

Sharing experience of HUL Pureit, if your usage is less don't go by it as it prompts a change of filter and other stuff by time and not actual water dispensed. I installed one at my Gurgaon home about 7 months back and recently it prompted with a message to call service helpline to change the filter. Even though I stay single one or two days with limited usage it still gave an indicator. When I ignored for few weeks, it simply stopped dispensing water. Even though they gave an extra filter I had to call service guy to get it changed as they need to reset something internally. Do consider this aspect before buying Pure-it unless I have understood it wrongly.

@Turbanator; I expect the system to work on a load + time principle. So you got into trouble due to the time factor. Not very nice but then I can see the inherent logic. In nay case a useful warning.

It's more like load or Time whichever comes early

hello

Having gone through all the posts of the last 20 pages of this thread, I am afraid I am none the wiser about which water purifier to choose (I find all the technical discussion about RO, UV etc truly overwhelming - blame it on my finance background). So following is my requirement and I would be extremely grateful for some step-by-step advice on how to go about this - water purifiers for dummies, if you will!

3 member family living in Chennai. Use corporation water supplied via tanker. Given risk of water scarcity, might have to go in for groundwater. Chance of moving to a different city as well. Budget of 10K but willing to push it to 15K if it is really worth the extra cost. Actually more worried about the maintenance cost - have a feeling the last guy overcharged us (some non-branded guy and we spent ~2K/yr).

The newly purchased device HUL Pureit Mineral RO + UV is installed and running. This is the latest launch from HUL priced at 13k.
I am looking out for suggestions from members who have been using purifiers for a long term.

1. The TDS of water before and after purification is 835ppm and 125-135ppm respectively.
2. Wife found that our neighbours' get a TDS output of 80ppm (mix of assembled and branded units) and she was beginning to stress out.
3. The technician who came in said he can disable the TDS modulator which will bring down the TDS to 80ppm and it can be enabled anytime later. Parallely, we had quite a fuss with the dealer who sold it.

TDS Modulator

1. What I understand is that towards the end of purification the RO removes most of the minerals in water. The TDS could be as low as 30-50ppm.
2. So a TDS modulator is used to add the minerals for a better taste. Is this true?
3. If yes, does it look like the RO purified water is already retaining some minerals and then the TDS modulator is adding more minerals resulting in 135ppm at output instead of 70-90ppm?
4. Can disabling a TDS modulator result in poor life of membrane and higher maintenance costs?

I really want to understand this and explain to my people at house so that they are relaxed and I can avoid the nagging or do something about this.

TDS modulator/controller/taste enhancer is nothing but mixing a semi filtered water with the output of the RO membrane.

Here is how the Kent RO system works (others are also similar)

Incoming water goes through Sediment filter - Pressure pump - Activated Carbon filter. The output of this stage splits and goes to RO membrane (output is almost H2O) and an Ultra Filtration (UF) (Salts are brought down considerably) stage. The output of the UF stage is mixed back to the main flow through a control valve (TDS control). The water then passes through Ultraviolet chamber and finally one more Activated Carbon filter.

Here is the flow diagram


Source: http://www.kentrosystems.com/pdf/Kent_Grand_Plus.pdf


I have set mixer valve to have the TDS around 70 as we felt that the water is tasteless anything below. If you are ok with the taste (125 TDS), then nothing wrong in using it.

The life of the membrane depends mainly on its usage and a degraded membrane results in wastage of water (lower yield). I usually replace the sediment and carbon filter once every 18 months. RO membrane can be used for longer time and I monitor the volume of the reject water (we collect it for bathing/watering plants/household cleaning, etc)

That was very detailed explanation bejoy. Thank you very much.
Have disabled the TDS modulator for now. Awaiting the technician's visit again this morning to check the TDS. If it is lowered to 80/70 will leave it at that.

Quite surprising to hear from technician that even without disabling the modulator the TDS levels would come down after a week's usage of the machine. Is it so?

Not likely. The reading will settle once the storage tank is replenished multiple times and that is what the technician probably meant.

As I expected the technician did disable the TDS modulator and left. He then came back yesterday morning to check on it. We drained two tanks of water. The TDS was measuring at 77ppm.

Explanation by Technician - TDS modulator is useful only in area that get metro water or water with chlorine and not the hard water. In metro water the TDS is lowered to 30ppm after which the modulator adds minerals to enhance taste. Since we do not get metro water TDS modulator is not necessary and he disabled it.

Though the water seems good, I am planning to get a TDS meter and check the TDS of bisleri water too. The maximum I am thinking of is to send the purified water to a lab to check if it is worth drinking.

Currently scouting for a gravity based water purifier, just to avoid the hassle of boiling the tap water (municipal water supply). Any recommendations? Thanks in advance

I have been using HUL Pureit for some years now and found it to be reasonably good. My only concern is with availability of germkill kit in open market since I picked a not-so-common model (was on sale). However, the customer care was helpful in arranging the kit for me which was delivered personally (was charged extra, which is mentioned on website).

The product isn't particularly cheap though since usage in family setup can eat through the germkill processor pretty fast.

I am sharing my experiences in case it helps any of you reading this.

For nearly a decade, i was using various model of the standard PureIt GermKill based water purifiers. I finally got tired of manually refilling the filter multiple times each day and decided to get an RO. As part of the research, i come across a post in this thread where various opinions and experiences were given. Thanks to Google and other sites such as Mouthshut, Quora etc, i heard about many other views on the various options and on the technical features of each. Based on all this i narrowed down on 3 options, ZeroB, HUL PureIT and AquaGuard. I felt that the average number of complains against other brand such as Kent, made them a riskier option. (This does not mean that the other brands are bad. In fact my parents are using Kent RO+UV for the past 2 years and are happy with it)

Once i narrowed on on these 3 brands i had a decide which model to go for. My initial budget was around 15-17k as my wife said that we should look at this as an investment that should last for a long time. My first preference was ZeroB Eco, followed by PureIT Marvella. Accordingly i raised a call back request in both of the respective websites and waited. ZeroB called back the same day (I raised the request in the morning) while PureIT called back after 3-4 days (The ZeroB Sales person had already come to my place, tested the water, and sold me his product!) What I liked about ZeroB was the promptness in responding to the professional way the sales was done. the water testing process too was good and accurate. I had bought my own TDS tester from Amazon, so i know what was the TDS reading like. I wanted to see if the Sales person would inflate the number just to push for the sale but he did not do so. (The TDS reading was around 450)

So i finalized the deal for the ZeroB Eco model, mainly for the point that the water wastage was just 30% compared to 70% wastage of other brands. It costed me about 20K. (On online sites, one can get it for lower but there were conflicting reports on whether the company would honor warranty from online sales, so did not risk it).

The unit came in 2 days time and the installation person came the day after, at the agreed time. This is where i faced an issue. When the box was opened, it was discovered that the filter was damaged. So the installation guy called by the dealer and a replacement unit was sent that day itself. The next day another guy came to install but he was literally in his training phase. (He admitted it was the first time he was actually fitting this unit!) He took a long time to fit as water kept leaking out and he was not able to figure out why. Several calls were made by him to his supervisor as well as by us to the Sales person to fix this and finally one senior guy instructed him on how to fix it. (He had apparently fixed the pipe connections to the wrong nodes). This whole experience did shake our confidence a bit but then the main thing was that the RO was up and running. (The post filtration TDS reading was a little above 20).

What i like about this unit is that the wastage is definately low. I once filled to 2 ltr bottle and measured how much water was wasted in refilling the water tank and it come to under a litre. The water output is good. I like the taste (please note that there is no TDS regulator). This unit also has a green light that lights up the transparent water storage unit, which i think make it look quite nice and brightens up the kitchen.

It has been about 4 months since installing it and it is working fine. We did have to again call a service guy as we were noticing black deposits in the water bay. Apparently it can happen to brand new units when the filtering material (carbon, i think) can shed initially. The service request was handled well enough. We are overall happy with this purchase.

Thanks for the suggestion mate. Ordered a HUL Pureit Classic 14L from Amazon