Drinking Water Filters: Choosing The Best Ones For You

by Trent Barrett

Sick of your water tasting like chlorine, or worried about the purity of your tap water? Or do you just want to save money on bottled water? There are several types of drinking water filters on the market right now, and each has strengths and weaknesses.

The cheapest drinking water filter is probably the basic activated carbon filter, like Pur faucet filters. The filter connection is in the $30 range, the filter replacements about half that price. These filters work by forcing water through an activated carbon filter. The activated carbon attaches itself to different impurities in the water, holding them in the filter while the purified water continues on. These filters are primarily to filter out living contaminants like cryptosporidium and bacteria, though they also filter out some inorganic contaminants. Minerals stay in your water.

To eliminate serious contaminants such as lead or high chlorine levels, a reverse osmosis drinking water filter is probably your best bet. These complex but ingenious devices can be installed right under your kitchen counter. Working with a filter that allows only pure water to pass, they slowly eliminate toxins from your tap water, holding purified water in a reservoir that you access through a separate tap on your sink. Though these filters work slowly, they can provide plenty of drinking water for your family each day, even filtering salt from ocean water and eliminating most biological contaminants as well. These filtration devices use as much as ten gallons of water for every single gallon of drinking water they provide, so they aren’t ideal for every household.

Reverse osmosis drinking water filters are very slow, but produce a pretty good quantity of water in the reservoir, and it is easily of bottled-water quality. You can figure on your osmotically-purified water costing you about five cents a gallon in most places, a large improvement on buying it in the store. Water that is rejected should be directed into your gray water storage if you have one, where it can be sprayed on your garden and lawn.

An ultraviolet drinking water filter is a great choice for anyplace that has a problem with biological contaminants in water. Good UV filters destroy all kinds of bacteria and other living things in your water, providing you with sterile drinking water. These filters are rarely used by themselves; instead, they are an addition at the front or back end of a reverse osmosis drinking water filter, eliminating the single flaw in these filters: that one cryptosporidium in the reservoir tank can contaminate the whole system.

Another type of drinking water filter commonly used is the ceramic filter. This uses something called diatomaceous earth, a natural silicon filter, to capture the contaminants in your water as they pass through in much the same way a carbon filter captures them. The resulting water is on a par with any carbon-filtered water.

Use your own needs and budget to determine which type of drinking water filter is the best choice for you. Osmotic filters are perfect for people who spend a lot of money on grocery-store bottled water, while those seeking just a little more filtration in their tap water will do well with ceramic and carbon drinking water filters.

About the Author:

Trent Barrett is a consultant who writes for Home water purifiers. You can visit their homepage to learn more about home water purification systems