Choosing Your Family's Home Water Filters Without Uncertainty
Getting clean, safe water for you and your family to drink is vital. In the United States, in Western Europe and in many other industrialized countries, the public water supply is treated to a minimum safety standard in water treatment plants. But sometimes accidents happen, sometimes corners are cut, and sometimes there is sabotage. Yet even when everything is done right at the water plant, that water may have to travel hundreds of miles through a network of (several) decades-old water pipes before it reaches your home. That network of old water pipes presents a large number of chances for your drinking water to become contaminated.
This contamination may never be bad enough to affect your health. Or it might make you vulnerable to some illness after a few months or years of continued exposure. Do you or your family have enough medical insurance coverage to pay for these bills? What if instead of a clear-cut disease, the contamination of your drinking water only makes you weaker and less energetic. How many promotions will you miss out on? How many pay raises will you lose because your co-worker is more energetic than you are? Doesn't it make sense for you to find and install the best home water filter you can afford to buy?
So how do you find out what home water filters really work? Well, for Americans, the NSF (accredited by ANSI, ISO and WHO) lists those manufacturers and products whose drinking water purifiers meet their stated claims. You can go to this page to search for the water filter that you want to buy to see if the claims made on the package are true.
But what should your home water filter do for you? The two most important contaminants that should be eliminated by any good home water filtration system are lead and cysts. Depending on where you live, you may also need to add herbicides, pesticides, nitrites, nitrates, copper and/or mercury to the list. What about chlorine and sediment? Well, any modern water filter that is sold in stores would already get rid of these two contaminants. Note that NSF/ANSI/ISO/WHO do not consider these last two to be health risks.
Getting rid of lead from your drinking water supply is especially important if you have pregnant women, nursing mothers, babies or toddlers in your family. While the current safe lead level enforced by the CDC is 10 mcg per dcl of blood, UK medical researchers recently discovered that even children with 5 to 10 mcg of lead per dcl of blood lose up to half of their reading and writing skills compared to their healthy peers.
Cysts of protozoan intestinal parasites like Giardia lamblia and Cryptosporidium are also a potential danger in your drinking water. The normal municipal water treatment using chlorine successfully kills all bacteria and protozoa in your tap water except for these two parasites. There have been several famous outbreaks of both these water-borne diseases in the past decade. For Giardia lamblia - Sydney (Australia) in 1998, Bergen (Norway) in 2004, and Oslo (Norway) in 2007. For Cryptosporidium (only the most recent years are listed) - Galway (Ireland) in 2007, Western USA in 2007, Northampton and Daventry (UK) in 2008, Dallas/Fort Worth (USA) in 2008.
What about bio-electronic water filters, ozone water filters, ultra violet filters, reverse osmosis water purification, resin ion exchangers, etc? Bio-electronic water filters is just a fancy name that doesn't tell you anything. But some of those I have seen claim to add live oxygen or some such nonsense to the water in order to rejuvenate your cells. Sorry, but that is plain nonsense. You get oxygen by breathing it in through your nose into your lungs. You are not a fish - you do not get oxygen by drinking it in your water. Besides that - there is no such thing as "live" oxygen. It is just a buzzword made up by the advertising and marketing departments of some unscrupulous companies.
How about ozone water filters? Unfortunately, ozone (an unstable oxygen molecule with three atoms instead of the normal two atoms) is poisonous to people and animals. Voluntarily drinking it should not be considered a good idea ... probably on the same level as drinking methyl alcohol or sniffing glue.
Ultraviolet is a proven way of deactivating the genes used by microbes to procreate. However, that is all it does. Cheaper home water filters or water filters that need to work in homes with low water pressure might include a UV lamp to weaken any bacteria and protozoa in your drinking water. But if you seriously need to get rid of microbes in your drinking water, buy a home water filter rated with 1 micron or smaller pores. These will effectively remove microbes from your water supply.
Resin ion exchange is the technology used by the better home water filters to remove heavy metals like lead and chemicals like nitrites and nitrates from your family's drinking water. It is not perfect, but is reasonably economical.
Reverse osmosis home water filters are some of the best and most effective water filtration devices you can find. The problem is that they are very expensive to buy and very expensive to operate. Reverse osmosis water purification for the home is only 5% to 15% efficient. The remaining water is usually thrown away.
When shopping for home water filters, you first need to decide what level of decontamination you need for your family's drinking water. Shop around for some brands and models of home drinking water filters which claim to do what you need. Then verify those claims against the NSF's online database of certified drinking water filtration systems.