How to Choose a Household Water Purification System
Water takes a long journey from natural sources to your faucet. Along the way, it can pick up sediment, chemicals and contaminants that affect its smell and taste.
Filters can remove these unwanted substances and protect home plumbing. A household water purification system uses multiple stages of filtration to remove harmful minerals, improve smell and taste, and protect against limescale and calcium deposits.
Reverse Osmosis
Reverse osmosis is one of the most popular household water treatment options, and it can drastically improve your water quality. It uses water pressure to force tap water through a semi-permeable membrane, with water molecules passing to the freshwater side while contaminants are rejected. This process mimics the osmosis demonstrated in many high school science classes, but it’s much more efficient and effective.
The RO system reduces a wide range of chemicals, including fluoride, chlorine, sodium, lead, arsenic, nitrates, heavy metals and total dissolved solids (TDS). It also removes bacterial elements and eliminates most sediment particles, which improves the taste, odor and appearance of your drinking water.
Unlike home distillation, a reverse osmosis system doesn’t require the use of electricity to work. RO filtration is ideal for households that want to cut down on expensive bottled water costs and waste.
An RO system can be used in conjunction with a water softener, but it’s important to note that a reverse osmosis and water softener address different types of contaminants. While an RO system filters out substances household water purification system that impact the odor, taste and appearance of your water, a water softener will remove hardness minerals from the water such as calcium and magnesium. This will prevent the RO system from overworking itself and reducing the life of the membrane.
Ion Exchange
Ion exchange is one of the best household water purification systems to improve the taste and smell of your tap water. This method involves passing a solution through or over resins that contain mobile or exchangeable ions. Ion exchange can target specific contaminants, such as calcium and magnesium in water softening or all dissolved ions in demineralization applications. However, ion exchange can be limited in its ability to target other contaminants like arsenic, uranium, perchlorate and carbonates. This is because ion exchange systems can only target solute ions that are more or less the same size as those on the ion exchange resin.
An ion exchange system can be configured with either cation or anion resin. Both types of resin have strong electric charges that will bind to positively charged ions on the surface of your water supply, replacing them with healthy negatively charged ions. For example, in water softening applications, magnesium and calcium ions will be replaced with sodium ions, while in demineralization, fluoride and nitrate ions will be replaced with chloride ions.
The advantage of ion exchange is that the resin ion-exchange medium is reusable and can be refreshed with a brine solution, making this a sustainable water filtration process. However, the resin will eventually degrade due to permanent fouling from contaminant chemicals. Ideally, the resin should be cleaned before this degradation becomes significant and it’s no longer able to perform the ion-exchange process. Systems with built-in brine tanks can make this easy to manage for home and business owners.
Carbon Filters
Carbon filters use a process called adsorption to soak up or adhere organic compounds like chlorine, heavy metals and volatile organic compounds household water purification system factory (VOCs) to their surface. A pound of activated carbon has a surface area nearly three times larger than the Pentagon, making it an ideal vehicle for adsorption.
Activated carbon is made from a variety of materials including coconut shells, coal and wood. It is incredibly porous, with tiny pores that act as parking spaces for contaminants as water passes through them. This makes them effective at reducing bad tastes and odors, as well as chlorine.
As a result of their wide application, carbon filters are often used in whole house water filter systems to remove a number of common chemicals and contaminants, such as mercury, herbicides, pesticides, VOCs and many more. Typically, they are included as the first stage of a whole house filtration system. They work by removing large particles such as dirt, rust and silt before they can clog other stages of the filtration process.
Carbon filters are also commonly used as a household air filtration system. They can be a great option for removing odors from animal waste such as cat litter and urine, as well as smoke odors from smoking and secondhand tobacco. They can also reduce the amount of harmful airborne germs such as viruses and mold, as well as particulates from secondhand and wildfire smoke.
UV Light
Water from dams, streams, bores and rainwater tanks can contain microorganisms which pose a risk to human health. The Department of Health recommends that naturally sourced drinking water is professionally tested and treated to ensure it’s safe to consume. There are a variety of treatment methods used to remove these harmful organisms, including UV light disinfection.
A UV system works by passing water through a chamber that contains a UV-C lamp. When the UV rays strike the nucleic acid of the harmful organism, they scramble it, rendering it sterile and unable to reproduce. Disinfected water is then dispensed and made available for consumption, bathing, swimming pools, washing clothes and other household uses.
To be effective, UV systems need to be positioned correctly in order to expose the water to the UV-C for long enough to deactivate it. This is why most UV systems come with a flow restrictor to ensure that the water doesn’t pass through the system too quickly.
As with any water treatment system, it’s important to have a quality pre-filter before the UV water filter to ensure that any sediment that might be in the water is removed prior to being exposed to the light. This prevents microorganisms from hiding behind loose particles in the water. Additionally, UV systems require a constant power supply to maintain the correct level of illumination for proper disinfection.