Clean, pure drinking water is important for your family's health. It can be as simple as picking up a cheap faucet-mounted filter for your kitchen sink, or as complex as having a plumber install an under-the-counter system with a reservoir, depending on your home's needs. Are you a heavy drinker of bottled water? Go for the under-counter water filter system, with its store-quality clean water. Just need your tap water to taste a little better? The faucet-mounted system is fine. For country water with biological contaminants, the UV system may be just what the doctor ordered.
If you already have good-quality water in your taps, you may just want to use the regular PUR or Brita type drinking water filter system. These filters use activated charcoal to filter out mostly biological contaminants, but also a few mineral contaminants, and deliver clean, good-tasting water to you. The less-used ceramic water filter systems work approximately the same way, but with diatomaceous earth instead of activated charcoal.
If your water is relatively unpleasant to drink and you find yourself spending a lot of money every month on bottled water, it might be a good idea to go with a reverse osmosis drinking water filter system. The most basic of these consists of an osmotic filter where the water comes in, a reservoir where purified water is stored, and a tap separate from your regular sink tap where your purified water comes out. Where the activated charcoal water filter system removes contaminants when water is forced through the filter, an osmotic filter removes contaminants passively, allowing very pure water to seep through the filter while all contaminants remain on the other side. The result is bottled-water quality drinking water.
Even though a reverse osmosis drinking water filter system is perhaps the best possible water filtration system you can get, it has a couple of problems. If you also live in a drought-prone area, you should know that for every gallon of purified water your reverse osmosis system makes, ten more gallons are wasted - not a problem if you water your garden and yard from a gray water tank, but a potential problem if you are very sensitive to wasted water. Also, once in a while a biological contaminant can get through the osmotic filters, and only one can contaminate your entire reservoir. For this reason, most reverse osmosis systems also include an ultraviolet water purifier at the end that shines UV rays through your reservoir, killing every biological contaminant there while leaving your water otherwise unchanged.
If you have a problem with hard water or people in your home with breathing problems, you may want to go with a whole house water filter system as opposed to just a drinking water filter system. These devices are complicated (requiring a plumber to install them) and expensive, but will treat the water in your whole house rather than just your drinking water. When you go this route, you will not only be drinking purer water, but because the shower will no longer vaporize chlorine and other toxins dissolved in your water, you'll be breathing purer air.
About the Author:
Article by Trent Barrett, writer for whole house water purifiers. You can visit their homepage to learn more about home water purification systems
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