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Eastern Washington State | I looked into doing this earlier this spring. Here is what I learned.
1. Larger systems don’t cost much more than a smaller system. They all use the same pump and valving, a larger system just has more RO elements.
2. Temperature of the water greatly affects the flow rate of the RO membranes. Colder water flows less. Because of this you probably need a larger system than you think. I wanted to be able to do 4000 gallons a day so I ended up pricing out a 8000 GPD system. All the flow ratings are made assuming 77 degree water.
3. Having a water softener isn’t really beneficial, you are just trading your calcium ions for sodium and the RO system has to remove those anyway. For hard water what was suggested was adding a descalant injector to the RO system. It didn’t add much cost.
4. The 8000 GPD system with descalant injection was around $12k. This didn’t include any water storage tanks or anything.
5. Even with RO water you are still going to want to add a little bit of AMS to you spray solution. There can be cations on the leaf that will tie up your herbicide and you want the AMS to counteract that.
6. You need to know what your total hardness and individual cations numbers are for your water before you even get started. In the end I decided not to get an RO system because my total hardness is just over 200 PPM. The threshold where an RO system starts to pay is 300 PPM.
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Spray water reverse osmosis
