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Choosing Great Drinking Water Filters

By: Trent Barrett

If you're tired of shelling out hundreds of dollars a year for bottled water, or if you are looking for a cheap alternative to your not-so-great tap water, you should look into getting a drinking water filter. There are several different kinds of filters for sale today, each with pros and cons. One is certain to work well for your drinking water needs.

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.

Though it's not quite a drinking water filter, you may have an ultraviolet filter added at the end of your reverse osmosis water filter, particularly in places that have contaminated water. A good UV filter will destroy any living contaminants, ensuring that your supply of water is as clean as possible. So the best reverse osmosis water filters actually have three different filters in a series to ensure the purity of your drinking water supply.

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.

If you're looking for the perfect drinking water filter, consider your tastes and budget. If you commonly spend heavily on bottled water at the store, an osmotic drinking water filter can save you hundreds annually and provide better, more consistently pure water. To simply filter a little of the bad-tasting additives from your tap water, ceramic and carbon filters are an excellent choice.

Article Source: http://www.articlemanual.com

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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