OS X Hax

Not much going on

I still have on my to-do list the conversion of the site to Serendipity. I would love to use WordPress, but they don't support PostgreSQL.

I've actually been doing lots of hacking lately on the house. I added a reverse osmosis system under the kitchen sink, then ran a branch from the output side of that over to the fridge and installed an ice maker. What struck me while I was doing all this was how little there was on the web about those subjects. I thought you could find anything on the Internet.

The RO system was straightforward enough. The whole system is piped with 3/8 inch and 1/4 inch Polyethylene tubing. The tubing connects from point to point with quick connect fittings (with the one exception being the connection to the water supply - that one is a compression fitting).

The hard part was figuring out how to connect the reject water output up to the sink drain. I wound up adding a dishwasher drain connection fitting to replace a piece of PVC under the side of the sink without the disposer. Then a baffling set of tubing and adapters took it from the barbed dishwasher fitting down to the 3/8" reject water tube. No sane plumber would have done it that way, but it doesn't leak, and I can get away with it because that water is not under pressure (the reject water hose comes from an air gap built in to the faucet and is gravity-fed to the drain).

After the RO system was installed and set up, I turned it off, emptied the tank and cut the supply tubing on its way to the faucet and put a T, a short piece of Polyethylene tubing and a valve, all quick-connect. Then I waited for the weekend so I could get a friend to climb under the house and run the polyethylene tubing from a hole in the sink cabinet over to the wall behind the fridge. I bought a small 'ice maker hookup box' from Home Depot to mount in the drywall behind the fridge. That was made with a 1/2" screw connection, but it was easy to add some adapters to turn that into another 3/8" quick connect fitting, ready to receive the 3/8" poly tubing. The "user" side of the box has a standard 1/4" compression fitting for soft copper pipe to the fridge.

It took a couple hours before I was convinced that none of the fittings were leaking. They warned against overtightening the copper compression fittings, but it turns out their warnings, IMHO, were overstated. I had to tighten those damn things pretty tight before they stopped leaking. The other leaky spot was the adapter from the 1/2" threaded copper valve to the quick connect adapter. You need lots of teflon tape for a plastic-to-copper screw connection, I guess.

My wife is exstatic about the whole set up. We have really good tasting water and ice cubes that don't make "floaties" in the water (or iced tea).

Posted by nsayer at May 25, 2005 02:03 PM