Feb
4
Water Pitchers and Faucet Filters
February 4, 2008 |
There are a number of national TV advertisements for water filtering pitchers and faucet filters. The faucet filters work by attaching to your sink faucet and diverting the water through a replaceable filter cartridge. The filtering pitchers require that you pour tap water into the top of the pitcher and gravity runs it through a replaceable filter element while the filtered water resides in the body of the pitcher.
These TV advertisements use visual tactics which pressure the consumer into thinking that their water could be dangerous to consume - which may or may not be true. For the most part, water in heavily populated industrial areas could indeed have numerous unsafe contaminants. But it is also true that many rural low-population areas can produce water which contains runoff from fertilizers and other chemicals. So the population in your location does not necessarily affect your water’s quality. Many municipal water treatment plants know exactly what is in the local water and they know exactly how to treat it. But it is still often desirable to remove some of the chemicals left over from the treatment process such as chlorine.
While these filtering pitchers and faucet filters do a good job, they are not very convenient or affordable to maintain. The proprietary filter cartridges and elements they use are simply activated carbon and possibly sediment filters. The same carbon and sediment filter elements are quite popular in higher volume and lower cost filter cartridges. These cartridges cost roughly the same as the faucet and pitcher elements, but they contain much more surface area, meaning they will process a lot more water between cartridge changes.
If you want to know what is in your water, check out our easy to use water testing kits.
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