The idea behind whole house water purification is to place a filter system on the cold water supply as soon as possible after it enters your home. This way you will have contaminant-free water in your kitchen, the showers, all over, even for the dishwasher and for washing clothes. In this article we will discuss what needs to be removed from your water, how these systems clean it out and what system would be the best for you.

1. What should you expect for a home water purifier?

It should take polluted water and give you back good, clean, healthy water. A good whole house water purifier will remove over ninety-nine percent of the harmful contaminants from the water. Contaminants like chlorine, the deadly chlorine byproducts (THMs), synthetic organic chemicals (SOCs), herbicides, lead, legal and illegal drugs, excess minerals, etc.

2. Okay, how in the world can these systems pull the contaminants out of the water?

First, keep in mind there is no single filter that will do the job, so, all whole house water purifiers will consist of a series of filters one after another. The series will begin with a pre-filter to remove larger particles of debris that might clog the finer filters to follow.

The best filter for removing the deadly chemical compounds that are showing up more and more in our water supplies is activated charcoal. So, a filter with activated charcoal will follow next, since there no technology has been found that will do a better job.

Stage three of the process is where things differ. This stage may be a distillation process, it might use reverse osmosis, or stages two and three could be combined together in a newer technology using ion exchange, called multi-stage or selective filtration.

The distillation process works by heating water until steam forms and that steam is moved to a separate chamber to cool and return to a liquid state. During the process bacteria is killed and inorganic compounds such as lead, potassium, calcium, etc are removed. The process cannot handle organic chemicals very well so distillation must be used together with carbon filtration.

Distillation units operate slowly producing only three or four gallons of filtered water a day and at a relatively high energy cost due to the electricity used.

In the reverse osmosis process water is forced against a membrane screen about as thick as a piece of cellophane. The membrane is semi-permeable allowing only particles the size of a water molecule, or smaller, to pass through. This effectively screens out all minerals and even a large percentage of the water itself. Like distillation this process does a poor job on organic chemicals because their molecules are too small to be trapped. Consequently, a carbon filter must also be used with them.

Most reverse osmosis systems produce only a gallon or two of filtered water an hour and will waste two or three times that for every gallon produced. They require a storage tank to create any volume of filtered water and, sometimes, a booster pump as well to maintain pressure. Initial costs for the various components and maintenance costs make these units about equal in cost with distillation.

Both distillation and reverse osmosis systems remove all the minerals from the water, including the ones your body needs. When the minerals are removed, the water changes it acidity and will tend to re-balance itself by stealing needed minerals, like calcium, from the body. For this reason, many health experts consider this water unhealthy.

The third system starts with the adsorptive power of activated charcoal and it is blended with a chemically charged resin to create a very different, but highly effective, filter media.

This mixture is compressed, or extruded, into a solid block of carbon whose core structure contains small, sub micron pores. As water passes through the carbon block, chemicals, drugs, etc. are physically bonded to the activated carbon. Any cysts such as cryptosporidium and giardia are trapped by the tiny pores, as are any remaining inorganic compounds. Finally, the chemical resin forces the ions of heavy metals, such as lead, to break their bonds with water and the resulting compounds can be trapped by the surface of the filter.

Selective filtration is it not designed to handle salty water, but, since most of the nation does not suffer from that problem, it’s usually not a big issue.

Big pluses with these systems are their initial cost and their low operating costs. They process water very quickly, with a very small loss of water pressure, so they don’t require booster pumps or storage tanks.

3. What is the best technology to use to get the job done for you?

No question about it, if you have a salt water problem, I don’t think you can beat a reverse osmosis system. It is what is was designed for years ago, and it does a great job.

But, if you are like most of us on a city water system or a chlorinated well, I think the selective filtration or multi-stage system is the way to go. The initial cost is less, and, since they do their thing almost maintenance free, they operate inexpensively, only requiring periodic filter changes.

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