Water Filtration System Comparison

There are many water filtration systems available, from the PUR cylinder you can screw on to your kitchen tap to whole house systems, so I'm definitely not addressing the pool water filter systems here, but the drinking water kind.

But even here, you will find a great deal of variation, from counter top and under counter to shower filter models. When you consult distributors, they will have items to offer for the kitchen, laundry and bathroom. You will see water filters, water purifiers, drinking water filters and those for refrigerators.

There is just no end to it. They refer to point of use water filtration systems, including bath or shower and even the washing machine and the water pitcher and most of these are relatively easy to install by way of adapting faucets.

So on the face of it, you can start small and end up providing all taps with their needed filtration devices, incrementing as you go along to suit your needs. But all these small purchases come with a huge drawback, namely, the filters themselves.

Many will have excellent performances and will deliver a good product... for a while. Then they get clogged up and they need replacing. You can imagine you have created a drain on your finances if you want to keep on drinking that purified water, let alone shower in it. And I'm not even mentioning the time it takes to go out and buy the filters and replacing them on the unit they are servicing or even the pollution the old filters create.

The only solution is to go for a whole house filtration unit which taps onto the source and distributes it after processing to the whole house. Why settle for a partial solution when it would be cheaper to things right from the start?

The way to go about this is to do some ground work thinking. If you live in an area that is serviced by a large organization, chances are you're only looking forward to improving the taste and getting rid of the chlorine smell. In this case, a small filter will do the job.

On the other hand, if you are regularly experiencing colored or troubled water pouring from the tap and other than chlorine smells, you may have to consider improving things.

You will probably agree with me when I write that I don’t need to heed any calls to reinvent the wheel, because all the information you need has already been made available online.

I’m thinking NRDC, the Natural Resources Defense Council, which is a not for profit organization and which has extensively researched this topic. They have referenced many extremely useful tools that will allow you to become familiar with what you need to know to make an informed decision in this matter.

Among others, they advise one to find out about the quality of the water coming out of the tap by requesting the yearly water quality report from your local provider and they point you to the Safe Drinking Water website to a resource that helps you understand what it says, unfortunately, when I tried to consult it, it was no longer online.

Yet both sites contain a wealth of information which I do not need to reproduce here and which you will find quite enlightening. For instance, there is the NSF tester. The website is a NSF Certified Drinking Water Treatment Units database that contains a large list of known contaminants and that allows you to find which manufacturer has a filter that can eliminate it.

Just by looking at the long lists of known contaminating substances that can be found in drinking water there is enough reason to make one’s skin crawl in discomfort.