An RPZ valve is a mandatory council requirement if you have an alternate water source connected to your home plumbing. Non-compliance can result in hefty fines.
If you had a water filtration system installed at the height of the water crisis, your installer may have put in a non-return valve to prevent your water from pushing back into the municipal supply. Unless it’s a true “RPZ” valve though, it’s not compliant.
“RPZ” is short for “Reduced Pressure Zone Backflow Preventer”. It’s a device which allows water to travel in one direction (from the municipal supply), but will not allow water to flow from your filtration system back into the municipal supply.
A basic non-return valve like the one below, is a step in the right direction, but it can fail and allow water to flow the wrong way. If a non-return valve fails (and they do, regularly), it’s not easily noticed.
Thousands of litres of potentially low-quality water could be pushed into the municipal supply without anyone being the wiser, and it may only be noticed when other houses in the area start seeing the effects, such as pipe corrosion, raised contaminant levels, or illness due to pathogens in their water.
Your local municipality is responsible for providing potable water to residential areas, and if private filtration systems are pushing water into the municipal supply, they have no control and can’t guarantee high-quality water.
An RPZ valve has two non-return, or “check” valves, and an air gap between them.
If water pushes back from the filtration system, and gets past the first check valve, it vents to the atmosphere and can’t push past it to the municipal supply.
As an added bonus, we can set it up to change over to municipal water automatically during load shedding, so no more opening and closing valves!
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