Drinking Water Filters: Choosing The Best Ones For You
Trent Barrett
If you're tired of shelling out hundreds of dollars a year for bottled water, or if you are looking for a cheap alternative to your not-so-great tap water, you should look into getting a drinking water filter. There are several different kinds of filters for sale today, each with pros and cons. One is certain to work well for your drinking water needs.
The cheapest drinking water filter is probably the basic activated carbon filter, like Pur faucet filters. The filter connection is in the $30 range, the filter replacements about half that price. These filters work by forcing water through an activated carbon filter. The activated carbon attaches itself to different impurities in the water, holding them in the filter while the purified water continues on. These filters are primarily to filter out living contaminants like cryptosporidium and bacteria, though they also filter out some inorganic contaminants. Minerals stay in your water.
To eliminate serious contaminants such as lead or high chlorine levels, a reverse osmosis drinking water filter is probably your best bet. These complex but ingenious devices can be installed right under your kitchen counter. Working with a filter that allows only pure water to pass, they slowly eliminate toxins from your tap water, holding purified water in a reservoir that you access through a separate tap on your sink. Though these filters work slowly, they can provide plenty of drinking water for your family each day, even filtering salt from ocean water and eliminating most biological contaminants as well. These filtration devices use as much as ten gallons of water for every single gallon of drinking water they provide, so they aren't ideal for every household.
A reverse osmosis drinking water filter gives you very pure water, often better than store-bought water, for about five cents a gallon in most places. While the rejected water is as much as ten gallons for every gallon of pure water created, it's pure enough that it can go into your gray water storage and be used to water your garden, ensuring there is no wasted water.
Ultraviolet drinking water filter systems are often added at the end of reverse osmosis filters and other types of water filters to eliminate living contaminants like bacteria from your water. These work by shining powerful UV light into your water, killing everything in the water before it reaches your faucet. These are particularly good additions to reverse osmosis water filters; biological contaminants are one of the few things that can get through these filters, and a single plasmodium can contaminate your entire reservoir.
Similar to activated carbon drinking water filters is a ceramic water filter. These are based on the same ideas behind commercial water filtration, and use diatomaceous earth to remove contaminants from water passing through them in a similar fashion to activated carbon. The water that comes out is as good as water from an activated carbon filter.
Use your own needs and budget to determine which type of drinking water filter is the best choice for you. Osmotic filters are perfect for people who spend a lot of money on grocery-store bottled water, while those seeking just a little more filtration in their tap water will do well with ceramic and carbon drinking water filters.
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