Why we launched the Tappwater Countertop Reverse Osmosis Unit in Australia
I want to tell you why this machine exists, because $899.99 is real money and you deserve a real explanation — not a slogan.
The problem I couldn’t ignore
Australian tap water is, by world standards, good. It’s disinfected, regulated, and it won’t make you sick tomorrow. I’ll say that plainly because fear-mongering annoys me as much as it probably annoys you.
But “won’t make you sick tomorrow” is not the same as “nothing in it.”
Your tap water carries chlorine, because chlorine is what keeps the pipes between the treatment plant and your house safe. It carries fluoride, added deliberately. Depending on your suburb and the age of your pipes, it can carry traces of lead, sediment, and rust. And increasingly, everywhere in the world, it carries two things nobody planned for: microplastics, and a family of industrial chemicals called PFAS — “forever chemicals,” so named because they essentially never break down.
Here’s what frustrated me: the filters most Australians own can’t touch most of that list. A jug filter is a pouch of loose activated carbon. Carbon works by adsorption — molecules sticking to a surface, like burrs on a jumper — and it’s genuinely good at grabbing chlorine and improving taste. Done properly, it can do much more than that: our own EcoPro tap filters use engineered carbon block, and independent testing puts them at 93% PFAS removal — exceptional for a tap filter, and honestly enough for most households. But carbon has a ceiling. Fluoride mostly doesn’t stick — our tap filters manage 70%, and a jug does far less. Dissolved metals largely pass through. And that last 7% of PFAS is beyond what adsorption can reach. If you want those numbers to start with a nine — or in some cases, to be total — chemistry needs a different mechanism.
If you wanted them actually removed, your options in Australia were an under-sink reverse osmosis system — a plumber, drilling through your benchtop, permanent modification, no good if you rent — or bottled water, which costs a family around $1,560 a year and, in independent testing, contains hundreds of thousands of microplastic particles per litre. You’d be paying to drink the problem.
That gap is why we launched this machine.
How reverse osmosis actually works
I want you to understand what you’re buying, so bear with me for three paragraphs of how this works. It’s genuinely interesting.
Reverse osmosis doesn’t filter water the way a sieve filters flour. It forces water, under pressure, against a membrane whose pores are 0.0001 micrometres across. That number means nothing on its own, so here’s the scale: the smallest microplastic particles are about 10,000 times larger than those pores. A virus is around 500 times larger. Even individual dissolved molecules of most contaminants are physically too big to pass through.
Water molecules get through. Almost nothing else does. What’s left behind doesn’t sit in the filter accumulating — it’s flushed away in a stream of waste water, which is why RO systems have a “waste ratio.” Ours runs at 3:1 — three litres of purified water for every litre flushed — which is more efficient than most systems on the market.
This is not new or exotic technology. It’s the same principle used in kidney dialysis and pharmaceutical manufacturing — places where “mostly pure” isn’t acceptable. What’s new is putting it in a box that sits on your bench and plugs into a power point.
Catches rust, sand and pipe sediment down to 5 microns. Its real job is bodyguard: without it, the membrane at stage 5 would clog in weeks.
Grabs chlorine, pesticides and chemical taste. This is the stage a jug filter stops at.
Stops calcium and magnesium crystallising inside the machine. This is why the cartridge lasts a year in hard-water cities like Perth and Adelaide.
Catches any carbon dust shed by stage 2. The membrane’s pores are microscopic — nothing gritty gets near them.
The stage everything else exists to protect. Pores 10,000 times smaller than the smallest microplastic. This is where the PFAS, fluoride, lead and bacteria stop.
A final carbon pass to take off the slightly flat taste pure water can carry. The difference between technically clean and genuinely good.
Puts calcium, magnesium and potassium back and lifts the pH to 7.5–8.5. The stage nobody else bothers with — and the reason the water tastes like something.
What the labs found
We didn’t test this machine ourselves and ask you to trust us. We sent it to two independent laboratories — Equinox Labs and Laboratorio Echevarne — and tested it against more than 80 contaminants. The full results are published on our website, and I mean the actual tables, not a summary with the awkward rows removed.
| Contaminant | Removal | Note |
|---|---|---|
| PFAS (5 compounds) | 99% | tested above real-world levels |
| Fluoride | >99% | |
| Lead | 100% | undetectable after filtration |
| Mercury | 100% | undetectable after filtration |
| E. coli | 100% | |
| Microplastics | >99.9% | by membrane pore size |
| Chlorine | >99.9% | 2.0 mg/L → <0.02 mg/L |
| Arsenic | 84.2% | we publish this one too |
I’ll also tell you a number that looks worse than the ones above, because it’s my favourite proof that we’re being straight with you: the machine’s total dissolved solids reduction is 85%, not 99%. Why? Because the final stage deliberately puts minerals back in.
The stage no one else bothers with
Pure RO water is stripped of everything — including the calcium, magnesium and potassium that make water taste like water. Drink it and it tastes flat, almost like nothing. Most RO makers ship it that way and let you get used to it.
Our seventh stage passes the purified water through Swedish Mineral Rock, which reintroduces those minerals naturally and lifts the pH to between 7.5 and 8.5 — the territory of premium bottled mineral water. So the water in your glass has had the industrial-age contaminants taken out and the geological-age minerals put back. No other countertop RO unit in Australia does this. That’s the 85%: we remove nearly everything, then add back the part your body and your tastebuds actually want.
What it’s like to live with
The unit is about the size of a coffee machine — 30cm tall, 22cm wide — and fits under standard overhead cupboards. You fill the 3.2-litre tank at the back, and purified water arrives in the 1.2-litre jug at the front, or straight into your cup.
There’s no installation. None. No plumber, no drilling, no landlord permission. You take it out of the box, plug it in, and you’re drinking purified water the same afternoon. The cartridge comes pre-installed.
The refill routine is the whole “operating manual,” so here it is: when the tank runs low, an indicator lights up. You lift the tank out — it’s removable, like a kettle off its base — tip out the leftover concentrate, refill it at the tap, and drop it back in. Ten seconds. That leftover water is the clever bit, by the way: it’s where the membrane sends everything it rejects. Plumbed-in RO systems flush their waste stream down a drain, which is exactly why they need a plumber. Ours sends it back to the tank you’re about to empty — that’s the trick that makes the whole no-installation design possible.
The part our customers didn’t expect to love: it dispenses at any temperature from room temperature up to 95°C. Our customers keep telling us the same thing — they haven’t touched their kettle since it arrived. Tea and coffee at 95°C, on demand. The 45–55°C setting is exactly right for baby formula — no boiling, no waiting for it to cool while a hungry baby lets the street know about it.
One thing I want to be upfront about, because it’s the most common misunderstanding: the unit does not chill water. It dispenses room temperature and hot. If you like your water cold — and in an Australian summer, fair enough — you fill the jug and put it in the fridge. I’d rather tell you that now than have you find out on your bench.
The plastic question
Every week, someone asks us a version of the same fair question: “You’re selling me a machine that removes microplastics — and it’s made of plastic?”
So let me tell you exactly what the water touches. The internal piping is premium PEX — the same pipe technology used in high-end plumbing systems worldwide, and among the safest water-contact materials made. It is 100% Bisphenol-free: no BPA, and none of the substitutes (BPS, BPF) that some manufacturers quietly swapped in when BPA got a bad name. It’s rated for high-temperature use, which matters here more than in a jug filter, because this machine pushes 95°C water through those pipes on demand. Every material in the water path is independently certified to strict food-contact safety standards.
The distinction worth understanding: microplastics in tap water come from degraded, weathered plastic — bottles, packaging and pipe debris breaking down over decades. Certified food-grade piping carrying water for seconds is a different material doing a different job, and the proof is in the output: the water leaving this machine has had more than 99.9% of microplastics removed. We test what comes out, not just what goes in.
The arithmetic
The machine is $899.99. The 7-in-1 cartridge inside it is good for 12 months or 1,200 litres — and that rating is conservative: in lifespan testing, the membrane’s salt rejection actually improved across its rated life, from 91.3% to 93.7%. The machine tracks usage and tells you when it’s time. Replacement takes 30 seconds, no tools, and costs $199.99.
So after the first year, lab-tested purified water costs your household 55 cents a day. A family buying bottled water spends around $1,560 a year and gets through 730 plastic bottles. This machine pays for itself against that habit in about seven months, then saves roughly $1,440 every year after — and the recycling bin gets a lot lighter.
Why you can decide this risk-free
I know the objection, because I’d have it too: “$900 is a lot for something I’ve never tasted.”
Agreed. So here’s the arrangement. Shipping is free — it’s free on everything we sell, always. Order before midday Sydney time on a weekday and it dispatches the same day. Then you have 60 days to live with it. Make your tea with it. Do the side-by-side taste test with your tap. Watch what your kids do when good-tasting water is available at the press of a button.
If you don’t want it, tell us within those 60 days and we’ll email you a free return label and refund you in full. No arguments, no restocking fee. And if you keep it, it’s covered by a 2-year warranty.
I can offer that because of what our returns actually look like: the people who send it back are overwhelmingly the ones who expected chilled water — which is why I told you about that four paragraphs ago.
The honest summary
Not everyone needs this machine, and I’d rather tell you that than sell you one you didn’t need. Our EcoPro tap filters cost $159.99 a year for the Compact and $179.99 a year for the SMR, screw straight onto your tap, and handle chlorine, microplastics and 93% of PFAS — for most households, that’s genuinely enough. This RO unit is our most premium product, and even it runs on the same simple arithmetic: about $200 a year for the cartridge once you own the machine.
But if you want fluoride, PFAS, lead, microplastics and bacteria removed as close to completely as testing can measure — verified by independent laboratories, published in full — without a plumber, without renovating, and without buying water in plastic for the rest of your life, then as of today there is exactly one machine in Australia I know of that does all of that and then remineralises the water afterwards.
That’s why we launched it.
Founder, Tappwater Australia
P.S. — If you read only one thing before deciding, read the lab results. Every removal percentage on this page comes from the published tables from Equinox Labs and Laboratorio Echevarne. We put our numbers where our claims are; ask any other filter company in Australia to do the same.
P.P.S. — One practical note. These come to Australia in small batches by sea, not air — it keeps the price where it is. At last count there were 86 units left from the current batch in our Sydney warehouse — and the next batch doesn’t land until late September. If everything above sounds like your kitchen, order from this batch — waiting costs two months.
or see full product details · read the full lab results