Watering
 

Hi my name is Nicole. I was wondering if you can buy reverse osmosis water and where in San Diego Ca can you find it. I know it may be a silly question.

Hi Nicole, welcome to OB! I live in NY so I can't help you, but hopefully someone else can.

hi Nicole, I've never been to Cali either. But a good place to look for RO water (if you don't want to buy a unit to make your own) is at an aquatics specialty shop.

When I run out of rain, that is what I do. I go to The Ocean Floor, a large aquarium shop in Phoenix. They sell RO (and salt) water by the gallon. Bring your own clean buckets or containers. Really good lightweight plastic containers are made by Better Bottle, intended for brewing, and sold at brewing supply stores.

At least here in Wyoming our grocery store's usually carry it. But I am even luckier as we have one car wash that has a place I get mine. It's even cheaper. So you might try looking around. I use the large plastic cat litter containers. The guy at the car wash calls me the cat lady, funny I don't even have a cat.

Welcome to the board Nicole.

I know many orchid growers in the San Diego area who successfully grow their orchids using the local tap water. Unless yours is astronomically high in salts, I would not bother with the extra effort in obtaining RO water. Just my opinion from Nor Cal.

Before I collected rain water or if I run out I buy a bottle of distilled water from Walmart for 88 cents a gallon.

Water quality varies all over the map - literally and figuratively (see AOS article) - and all orchids can benefit from the use of pure water.

I don't know what you pay for purified water out west, but the best price I've seen here on the east coast is $0.79/gallon. If you want to get serious about using it for your orchids, you'll save money by purchasing an RO system - not to mention not having to lug bottles home from the store!

For folks with smaller collections, in apartments, I build counter-top systems that one can connect to the sink spigot, fill up your jugs, then just put it away until you need it again. Dividing the relatively small purchase price by the minimum RO production before any filters are replaced, the cost is $0.09/gallon (most folks are getting 33%-50% more gallons out than the minimum). In the long run, replacing filters on the recommended frequency, that drops to $0.0475 during the life of the membrane (6000 gallons of pure water produced). Going forward, that drops even more.

^^ I agree with this, even though I haven't done it yet. I am paying .25 for a bit over 2 gallons. It's not bad but I am getting tired of lugging bottles in the winter. At least in the summer I only do it for my humidifiers as I use rain water for the plants.

One of these days Ray, one of these days.