I’m considering getting a water cooler for my home. The only thing holding me back is the maintenance involved.
So, does anybody know? Is it a pain in the ass? Or is it fairly simple?
Thanks.
The only maintenance for the water cooler I used to have was to replace the water jugs, occasionally wipe it down and clean out the spill tray. I didn’t exactly buy it, I paid a few bucks a month for it from the company that provided the water. Then when we were moving, now after maybe 7 years, we let them know they could pick it up and they said we could just keep it. Nothing ever went wrong with it. We stopped using it eventually and I don’t remember what happened to it, probably just left it out for an appliance pickup.
We have a water cooler in our home (because we have well water with high levels of iron that is subsequently replaced with sodium in a whole-house water softener).
The water cooler is in a sunny area in the house, and one issue that we noted some time back was the presence of a film of green algae in the reservoir after a few months of use. As soon as I noticed this, I scrubbed the whole unit down with a bleach solution, and thoroughly flushed it with the bleach solution as well.
I read online that the issue can be prevented by not keeping the water cooler in a sunny area, or if that was not possible, to cover the tank. I got a few elastic fabric covers for the water cooler bottles, and haven’t had any issues since with algae.
So far the only maintenance I’ve had to do on ours is change the water bottles. And ours is a legit cooler, not just a dispenser. Has an option for hot water, too, although we’ve never used it.
The actual ones that cool are as reliable as a fridge or chest freezer. Like anything, they can fail, but there is no maintenance to be done - there’s a sealed compressor and possibly a fan (probably not), and a thermostat. That’s it, and the thermostat is not alterable. Usually these kind of things run for 10-20 years, with some lasting even longer, but if it fails, you just buy another.
The tough part is the bottles. They are about 40 lbs, and you have to lift them up and flip them over real quick with the cap off to not spill water everywhere.
If anything fails, that’s where the failure will be. You can screw up and spill water everywhere, and now you have to ‘maintain’ the floor. You can damage your shoulder and that’s where it really gets expensive.
I recommend you consider a reverse osmosis or higher end active carbon water filter instead. If you want it cold, fill a jug from it and put it in the fridge. Reverse osmosis systems are a couple hundred bucks, and the maintenance is easy, you just swap filter cartridges about once a year or so, and you can get them from Amazon for $20 or so. Most are interchangeable between any brand of osmosis system - they all use the same filters. Same with the membranes - these typically last 5+ years, but you can get the actual high quality membranes right from Dow Chemical for $30-$50 on Amazon as well. And the valves, also. Again, the tubing sizes are actually all the same, so you can buy 3rd party system valves for $10 and they work fine, I replaced the valve on mine, even.
Anyways, RO systems are cheaper than bottled water, 3-5 filters and an osmotic membrane will take out nearly all known pollutants, and there’s these $15 testers you can get that you can check how well the osmosis portion of the system is working. I personally think everyone should have one, it makes far more engineering sense to have endpoint filters specific to the water that people actually are going to drink than to try to filter millions of gallons of public water perfectly and to expect the old pipes in the street not to leach.
All the ones I’ve seen have the bottle sealed with a plastic plug and the intake is pencil shaped. Flip the bottle over, set it in place and the “pencil” pushes the plug in – no spilling at all.
The plug itself is covered with a sticker you removed when placing the bottle, just so you don’t shove a nasty plug up into your bottle.
What flip? Ours is such that you open the bottom compartment, slide out the old bottle, take the tube out, place it into new bottle, slide back into cooler. None of this silly “lift and flip bottle” crap.
We love our cooler. We live in an area where the water tastes like crap. With the cooler we have cold good tasting water whenever we want it. It costs 2.99 cdn to refill the jug and it has a button to heat water for hot drinks within a minute or two. Great for my morning tea.
The only care we’ve needed is a quick wipe down occasionally and rince the drip tray once a week. Would have a hard time living without it.
Mine has a fairly simple maintenance routine involving bleach and water.
Look nice.
Ours is the traditional model but has the benefit of gravity working whether we plug it in or not. Which we actually consciously decided NOT to do since we didn’t want our toddler (at the time) able to press the red level and get scalding hot water on demand.
Never maintained it. No maintenance.
Thanks for the feedback guys.
I was concerned with mold issues. But I guess that won’t be a problem as long as I keep it out of the sun.