Tap water is not always clean
There will always be a time when we are unsure of how clean the water that comes out of our taps is. More often than not, we get our drinking water from our taps so there’s the added risk of drinking impurities like dirt, minerals, and chemicals.
But it’s easy to remove these impurities through the use of water filters.
But what’s the best water filter for your taps?
Choosing the right water filter can be difficult because there are a lot of brands and types out there. Before you even decide to buy a water filtration system, you need to determine if your water is fluorinated or chlorinated. You also need to consider your water source, like if it’s coming from your own tank or from the town water source.
All of these and more can hinder you from getting the right water filter. But don’t lose hope just yet. Listed below are some of the best water filters for you and what they can do for you.
- Activated Carbon Filters are the most common type of water filters and they are the cheapest among the water filters in the article. These filters absorb organic contaminants that’s often the cause of bad odour and taste in water. They can also remove chemicals like cleaning solvents, pesticides and other by-products of chlorine. Sadly, they cannot filter out metals like lead and copper.
- Ceramic filters can block most microbes and help prevent bacterial build-up due to its colloidal silver lining, but they cannot remove chlorine unless it’s combined with an activated carbon filter. Ceramic filters can get blocked easily when you’re filtering water with high sediment content because they are designed to not allow anything larger than water molecules to pass through it. If you want your ceramic filter to be effective, it needs to be cleaned regularly.
- Ion exchange units are perfect if you have “hard” water flowing into your home. Hard water is riddled with minerals, calcium, and magnesium and they can be removed easily through ion exchange units. There are some models that can filter out radium and barium and they can remove half of the fluoride in your water. The only downside to this filter is that it doesn’t remove bacteria.
- Activated alumina is for home owners who want a whole-house water filtration system that would filter out all the water flowing into their homes. It removes up to 95% of fluoride in the water. But unlike other water filters, activated alumina gets blocked easily, especially if your water source provides hard water.
- Distillation units can be expensive because they need electricity to help purify water. They can purify water through boiling, and then they collect the vapour and cool it. These are efficient water filters because they are able to remove nitrates, sodium, fluorides, heavy metals, and even foul tastes, smell, and colour. They can even remove pesticides, dioxins, and chloroform.
- Lastly, we have the reverse osmosis units and these are the best water filters in the market today. This is a multi-stage water filtration system and it removes the contaminants that distillation units cannot. An ultrafine reverse osmosis unit can block particles bigger than 0.0005 microns. Unlike the distillation unit, this one doesn’t need electricity.
Take the time to study the water flowing into your home and its water source before choosing the right water filter for you.
