Wally’s Workshop

Whole house water purification means just what it says. The idea is to filter all the water coming into your home by installing a water filter system near the point your water supply line enters the home. That way all the water past that point has been filtered and you can have good, safe water everywhere, in your sinks, showers, bathtubs and even for laundry and the dishwasher. In this article we will look at whole house water purification systems, what they do, how they do it, and the best technology to use to get the job done.

1. What should a good home water purifier do?

You should expect any good house water purifier to filter out at least 99 percent of all the dangerous contaminants and leave you with good, healthy water to drink, cook with and bathe in. Poisons like chlorine and the over 600 carcinogenic byproducts of chlorine, lead, weed killers, sex hormones, antibiotics, chemotherapy medicines, etc., all of which have been found in water supplies.

2. Okay, how in the world can these systems pull the contaminants out of the water?

You need to know home water purifiers are not just one big filter. They are made up of a number of filters, each of which has an assigned task. The first filter the water encounters is called a pre-filter and its job is to clean out any large globs like dirt, debris from pipes, etc. that could harm later filters.

The best filter for removing the deadly chemical compounds that are showing up more and more in our water supplies is activated charcoal. So, a filter with activated charcoal will follow next, since there no technology has been found that will do a better job.

In order to remove the remaining pollutants the third step usually will involve either distillation, reverse osmosis, or what is referred to as selective filtration or multi-stage filtration utilizing an ion exchange process.

Distillation is a process that passes water over a heated coil to form steam that rises to a cooling tank and condenses back into a liquid. This process kills any remaining bacteria in the water, and it removes inorganic compounds like lead, calcium, potassium, etc. (The process does not remove organic chemicals, so, a distiller must always be used in combination with a carbon filter).

Only three or four gallons a day is produced by these units so you can see they are very slow. Also, the electricity needed makes them have a relatively high energy cost.

In the reverse osmosis process water is forced against a membrane screen about as thick as a piece of cellophane. The membrane is semi-permeable allowing only particles the size of a water molecule, or smaller, to pass through. This effectively screens out all minerals and even a large percentage of the water itself. Like distillation this process does a poor job on organic chemicals because their molecules are too small to be trapped. Consequently, a carbon filter must also be used with them.

Reverse osmosis systems waste as much, or more, water than they produce, and they are slow producers as well, producing one four or five gallons of water a day. If the home water is inadequate, a booster pump may be required and, in order to accumulate a volume of water, special storage tanks are needed. Component cost, waste and operating cost make the complete systems about equal in cost with the distillation units.

Since both of these systems remove all minerals from the water, including healthy trace minerals the body needs, a problem is created. Water in this condition becomes a little acidic and, after we drink it, it will have a natural tendency to return to a neutral pH. It does that by pulling calcium from our body. For this reason, some medical professionals feel this water is unhealthy to drink.

The next system builds on activated charcoal’s adsorptive power by mixing it with a resin that has been chemically charged to produce a tremendous filtering material.

This blend is compressed into a solid carbon block in which contaminants bond either chemically or physically, like little magnets, to the adsorptive surface. Minerals like lead or mercury are then removed by an ion exchange that chemically attaches them to the resin. Chlorine, herbicides and other chemicals physically attach to the charcoal through adsorption. This compressed carbon also has a tiny, sub-micron pore structure that will remove any chlorine-resistant cysts like Cryptosporidium and Giardia.

Selective filtration is it not designed to handle salty water, but, since most of the nation does not suffer from that problem, it’s usually not a big issue.

For people without salt water issues, there are big pluses to these systems. They filter water rapidly with little resistance to the water flow, so there is no requirement for storage tanks or booster pumps which means lower initial costs and lower operating costs.

3. Of the three systems, which one should you choose?

If you are dealing with salt water problems, you definitely want to go with a reverse osmosis system. Yeah, it is wasteful and expensive but, it will clean up the water, believe me.

Barring a salt water problem, I don’t think you can beat selective filtration for the quality of water produced, or for the price. The unit cost is the lowest and they should operate almost maintenance free, only needing a periodic filter change.

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