Why Get a Water Purification System?
Recently I installed this whole house water purification system. Do you use bottled water? I know I do. Either to protect the environment or to save the expense of bottled water, maybe you should purify your own water at home.
When it comes to home water purification there are several choices and a wide range of prices for the systems. You can determined which is the right one for you with some information, and that’s what I’ll try to do here.
Consider the Source
First, is your water coming from the water company or from a well? If you have a well, I’m sure you know about what bad stuff can be in the water, but for the rest of us:
The EPA lists six major well water contaminants: micro biologicals, heavy metals, organic chemicals, radionuclides, fluoride and nitrates. Microbiological contaminants such as e. Coli bacteria occur naturally in the environment, and are found in soil and human and animal waste.
This bad stuff can also show up in your municipal supply plus some more chemicals that are used to kill the live germs, ingredients like chlorine.
Is Your Water Safe?
Are you afraid of your water supply? Maybe you should have your water tested to see what’s actually in there. Also, you can go to your municipal water supply website and get the latest water quality report, but keep in mind that then it flows through pipes to get to you. At minimum you’ll pick up some more iron from the pipes and who knows what else. And the water quality can be variable over time, to say nothing of the bad taste.
What to do? You drink bottled water so you’re safe, right? Maybe not, like when you wash your vegetables or rinse your pasta. What nasty bacteria did you just add from your water supply? Are we going to far here? Doesn’t that really depend on what’s really in your water supply?
Whole House Water Purification
Let’s start with the whole house system that I just installed for a customer of mine. It was both simple and relatively inexpensive. It was the Vitapur ultraviolet (UV) light purifier together with an added sediment filter. UV light kills much of the living stuff in the water and the sediment filter strains it out and also takes out some of the heavy metals and sediment. UV treatment is a good way to handle well water. Now you can rinse your vegetables and feel safe. When we are talking whole house water purification the most important factor of the system is flow rate, i.e. how many gallons per minute (GPM) the filter can handle.
Under Sink Drinking Water Purification
But what about your drinking water? You may want to up your purification for drinking water and there are so many choices out there that I can’t cover them all in one article. However, briefly I’ll say that there is reverse osmosis (RO) which gives you the purest water of all, but there are other choices as well. Here’s an informative article on under sink water purification. In fact RO is so clean it even strains out bacteria and viruses.
Is your bottled water RO? Not if it doesn’t say it is. Aquafina is RO but it’s also the most expensive!
The RO systems use a tank to store the purified water and a separately installed water tap to get the water from the tank into your drinking glass. It only cleans drinking water therefore if you have well water you’ll need a whole house unit too. Also consider that RO systems wastes as much water as they clean, and some units 5 times what they clean.
I know, it’s starting to get complicated here so I’ll give you one more choice that is somewhat of a middle-ground approach. That would be to install a top-quality filter under your sink that does not use a tank. Instead it goes between the cold water supply coming into your faucet and your faucet; you could put another on the hot water side if you wanted to. This company seems to be a leader in quality in this department. CuZn has an inline filter, the UC-200 will cost you about $125 and it claims to bacteriostatic, and I’m sure it is. It filters out bacteria. Is it sufficient without the ultaviolet light system? Maybe not for well water but with municipal water you can rinse your vegetables with clean cold water!
What Whole House Water Purification Will Cost
And when it comes to price you can spend $500 on a good RO for drinking water and the CuZn inline model is about $125. Also my customer paid about $200 for the setup I installed. The Vitapur is 15.8 GPM and HQUA has a whole house 12 GPM UV water purification unit for $189 on Amazon. You can pay up to $1500 for some whole house systems that combine UV with a few large filters for multi-stage filtration, but they’re not as clean as RO.
With the CuZn inline model you can rinse your spaghetti with peace of mind, but it’ll be cold. See I told you it was getting complicated. Install the HQUA as a whole house solution and then either RO or the UC-200, and you should be good to go. Good luck!
This article originally appeared in GlennPierceHomeRemodeling.com.
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