RO Water TDS Range and Recovery Rate: Where Does the Rejected TDS Actually Go?
A 2000 LPH RO water plant treating 1200 ppm borewell water doesn’t destroy 1200 ppm worth of dissolved solids. It concentrates them into a smaller stream and sends that stream somewhere: usually to a drain, sometimes to a soak pit, occasionally into a monsoon storm drain where nobody’s checking. That “somewhere” is the part of the RO water TDS range conversation that gets skipped, and it’s the part that decides whether your plant runs quietly for years or turns into a compliance problem. Most guidance on RO water TDS level stops at “the ideal RO water TDS range is 50-150 ppm. “True, but incomplete. The concentrate stream, not the product water, is where the TDS load your feed water carries actually ends up, and how much of it you’re generating depends entirely on your plant’s recovery rate. What Recovery Rate Actually Means Every RO water plant splits incoming feed water into two streams: permeate (the clean, low-TDS water you wanted) and concentrate or reject (the leftover w...