u/EagleBrew

Hey everyone,

Has anyone here had hands-on experience with countertop or under-sink RO systems? I'm in the market for one and leaning toward countertop — mainly because it requires no installation and typically offers a better filtered-to-waste water ratio.

I consider myself a fairly technical person, so I did a fair amount of research before posting. What I kept running into is that virtually all brands seem to use the same core technology, and from what I can tell, many are sourcing the same or equivalent RO membranes. If that's true, the wide price range is hard to justify on paper.

That skepticism extends to performance claims as well — if the underlying technology is largely commoditized, it's hard to see how different units would produce meaningfully different results, unless a brand is genuinely investing in proprietary membrane development, which seems unlikely at the consumer price points we're talking about.

Are there any engineers or industry insiders here who can shed some light? Specifically curious about:

• What actually differentiates units at different price tiers (build quality, flow rate, pre/post filter stack, TDS consistency)?
• Are OEM membranes truly interchangeable across brands, or are there real performance deltas?
• Any brands worth the premium, or is this a space where a mid-range unit does the job just as well?

Appreciate any real-world insight — sales pitches need not apply.

Hey all, looking for some suggestions.

I work at a startup as a technical lead. We design and sell consumer products. Until recently we had only a few mechanical and electrical engineers handling all of product development, and documentation was pretty informal. As we grow, we're trying to set up a more organized way to document things.

Personally, I like writing research notes, guidelines, and tutorials in Markdown — it's much easier to maintain consistent formatting than DOCX or LaTeX (we still use LaTeX for some printout-quality documents). I also like the version control benefits of Git from my robotics background, so I'm comfortable with the basics.

My question: would it be wise to keep all of our technical documents in Markdown inside a dedicated Git repo, even though we aren't a software company? Has anyone here set up something similar in a hardware/consumer-products context? Curious about pitfalls — image/asset handling, reviewers who don't use Git, exporting to polished PDFs, etc.

Thanks!