Water filters are meant to remove impurities from the tap water. While most cities are supposed to make public water supplies safe enough to drink, they are by no means as clean as they can be. Tests have often showed questionable impurities present in pretty much all water supplies coming out of your faucet.
The most obvious thing found in most tap water is chlorine. This is the same thing you find in swimming pools and bleaches. One good thing about chlorine is that it is meant to kill unwanted bacteria or at least to keep them in check. While that is a good thing, chlorine in and of itself is actually a carcinogen, and can cause problems in the long run even if you don’t die from it right away. Other impurities are often found in tap water as well. While some are minerals that can be good for the body, some are bad.
So it goes without saying that if you want to drink better water, you have to either buy bottled water at the stores or have a delivery service. This can be very costly and also bad for the environment due to the plastic used in the bottled.
Another alternative is to use water filters in your home and basically make your own purified water. This is a good idea, bu not all water filter s are created equal, and it’s a good idea to learn about water filters before you decide what kind of water filter is right for you.
So, which water filter is best for you? Well this depends on what your budget is. In general there are three types of home water filtration systems.
First, for the budget conscious (at least initially), the popular small, Brita-type or Pur filters you mount to your faucet can provide a basic filtration to immediately improve your water quality. However, the draw back is that the improvement is generally limited compared to more advanced filters. Also, while the barrier of entry is quite low, each filter is not designed to last very long (due to the small size), and if you add it up, the replacement filters can add up to be expensive over time, and result in a not-so-low cost per gallon figure.
The second type is an over the counter type that stands about a foot tall and can sit either over the counter or under the sink. These can be single stage or multiple stage. Normally the more stages the better. These are usually more expensive than the small, faucet mounted units off the bay, however, since the filters are bigger and last longer, typically you will get a better cost-per-gallon over time, and thus it will be cheaper in the long run.
The third type is the reverse osmosis water treatment systems. In a nutshell, these use prefilters to remove sediments and then by the way of “reverse osmosis” via a membrane filter in the middle, it takes out more junk such as heavy metals as well as microbes that regular filters normally cannot remove. Then finally the water goes though a post filter to filter it once more before it goes into a storage tank which then dispenses to a small faucet/dispenser over the sink. This system normally run about $160-$300 depending on how many stages it has. This costs more upfront than both types of filters above but because of the purity of the water, it is often the choice of many more households. As a matter of fact, many water bottling companies use the reverse osmosis process to make their water, just on a larger scale.
So there you have it. The three basic types of water filters. Spend what you can afford, but at the end of the day, I personally think the best thing to do is to find a reverse osmosis unit on sale and start enjoying the highest quality of homemade water there is. I got my basic 3-stage reverse osmosis unit at Lowes a couple of years ago for about $80 due to a clearance. They normally run about $160 (last I checked), which is not a bad price at all, but if you can pick one up when on sale, be sure to get one!