Types of Water Filters
The quality of our drinking water has been steadily declining. So far our government has turned a blind eye to the problem. They continue to dump chlorine into our drinking water, ignore corporate pollution, and fail to address the newest threat to the public health – prescription drugs seeping in to our water supplies. If you’re not using a quality home water filtration system here’s what could be lurking in your drinking water:
- Human Feces
- Chlorine
- Rust & Sediment
- Prescription Drugs
- Chemicals
- Farm Run Off
- Corporate Waste
Right now many areas are pushing to introduce “recycled water” into the public drinking supply. That might sound harmless until you learn that “recycled water” is the waste that gets flushed down the toilet. The methods in place to separate the water from the human excrement include the use of chemical disinfectants. In parts of Southern California alone around 5 million people drink from regional aquifers partly recharged with treated waste water. Chlorine is used by municipal water systems to remove microorganisms from water. There’s only one problem, chlorine is poison! While it’s safer than having pathogenic organisms in the water, it isn’t truly a safe ingredient in your water. The National Cancer Institute believes that those of us who consume chlorinated water have a 93% increased risk of many cancers, in part because it combines naturally with organic matter in water to make trihalomethanes molecules that contribute to the formation of cancer.
What You Can Do To Make Sure Your Drinking Water Is Safe?
It’s almost impossible to remove 100% of every possible type of contamination from city water, but by using a home water filtration system you can greatly improve upon the quality of the water you consume. You have to be careful when selecting a water filter for your home. Many of the water filters being sold are relatively ineffective, and overpriced.
Reverse osmosis (RO) is a water purification technology that uses a semipermeable membrane. An RO filter uses pressure to push pure water away from any other material in tap water. The downside to this is that it removes even the beneficial properties of water.
A carbon filter uses activated carbon to adsorb contaminants and imputities. Carbon filters are most effective at removing chlorine, sediment, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), taste and odor from water. They are not effective at removing minerals, salts, and dissolved inorganic compounds.
Ultraviolet radiation is used in combination with other filtration technologies as a pretreatment or polishing step to sterilize and disinfect water. UV systems are typically used to pre-treat a water supply that is considered biologically unsafe (lake or sea water, well water, etc).
The Berkey water filter system is also considered a revolutionary system. Through diligent testing and research it has been proved that Berkey water filters removed viruses to purification standards, pathogenic bacteria, cysts and parasites to non detectable levels and harmful or unwanted chemicals to below detectable levels. Until these tests results were made public, words like non detectable were seldom if ever used to describe the abilities of a water filter to remove harmful pollutants. Berkey purification systems do not remove the beneficial minerals from the water but they do extract harmful heavy metals such as lead and mercury as well as sedimentary minerals such as iron oxide.
- Performance: does the water system do an exceptional job at removing both living water contaminants (bacteria & viruses) and non-living water contaminants such as toxic metals like lead & copper.
- Cost: What is the upfront cost of the unit and how much are replacement filters and the total cost of ownership price per gallon of filtered water.
- Quality: Is the unit durable, and is it backed by a 100% money back guarantee.
