What Types of Water Filters Are Available Commercially?

Water filters are big business in the US, but why? In this country, we are blessed with good, constant, government-supervised water supplies designed to make sure every household has what has come to be regarded as a basic human right: safe, clean-tasting water. Whether it is actually a right or not may be debatable, but it is certainly an essential: we need water to survive and to function, and we have grown accustomed to using water for washing both ourselves and the things we use, making water indispensable from the point of view of hygiene and the more recent concept of personal hygiene, by which we mean not smelling foul and avoiding health issues caused by dirt in all its many forms.

The idea of filtering water stems from the knowledge that tiny particles of unwanted substances can be contained in water, invisible to the naked eye but present all the same. Some of these contaminants we can smell, for instance, sulfur, which makes itself known by an odor often referred to as the smell of rotten eggs.

Water can also smell of bleach, from the chlorine used to sterilize it. While this should perhaps be reassuring, because it tells us a water quality company or department is on the case and has taken chemical steps to sanitize our water, that doesn’t make the smell (and taste) pleasant. One very good way to ruin a nice cup of coffee, tea, hot chocolate, etc. is to infuse it with the smell of a household cleaning agent. A filter can remove sulfur and bleach.

Something that can be seen by the deposit it leaves over a long period is iron, which can result in an unsightly reddish-brown stain below a faucet in a bath or basin. Iron is also largely responsible for what we think of as a metallic taste.

These are all essentially harmless, but water can also contain some nasty, dangerous characters such as lead and even arsenic. These can be a particular problem for people who have their own water supply from a well or borehole. If you think about how water gets to these subterranean places, it falls from the sky and soaks into the soil – containing who-knows-what, from feces to chemical fertilizers – then on down through layers of mud, gravel, or whatever. How can we really expect it to be pure after such a journey?

Do-it-Yourself Water Filters

If water is not filtered as soon as it enters the property, it is going to come out of the faucet in the kitchen, the bathroom, the laundry room, and other places. Ideally, therefore, we need a whole-house water filtration system, and the professionally installed ones can do a fantastic job of protecting us.

Reverse osmosis systems, for instance, use semi-permeable membranes (very thin sheets of some man-made material) that have microscopic holes through which pure water can go, but even things as tiny as bacteria, viruses, and chemicals cannot. So, the water squeezes through, but the bad things are kept out.

This could be seen as a modern improvement on traditional filters which work along the same lines as the paper filters used for making coffee – but they are super-sophisticated.

Among what could be considered the over-the-counter options (the kinds of things you can buy in hardware stores), filtration can be via activated carbon into a jug, so you fill the top with water, and it goes through the carbon filter which takes even chlorine out. These can be very useful and are relatively cheap, but they do only a small, specific job.

There is also UV filtration, which uses ultraviolet light to kill bacteria, thereby using light to do the job that a chemical such as chlorine might do.

For drinking and cooking purposes, another option is using bottled water, but that is outrageously expensive and often ecologically unsound as it is shipped in from other countries. With modern filtration options, we can all use the lovely liquid that comes to us in pipes – but the better, the more sophisticated and more professional the better.