Published on November 18th, 2020
You’ve decided you’d like to buy a water purification system by cleanairpurewater.com and have no idea where to begin.
You’ve looked online and that has only increased your confusion. How does the average person learn which system is best for their situation? Let me explain.
What is a water purification system? That may vary widely and depends entirely on the content of your water. It may consist of a whole house carbon filter plus a kitchen system, typical for city water.
Or you may have specific problems in your water that you’d like to address. There are numerous examples. So the concept of a home water purification is flexible.
There is not one system that you buy and it fixes everything. Instead it consists of components each of which may vary depending on your water source and the contaminants in it.
I always suggest you start your research by finding your local water quality report. Your water provider is required by federal law to give this to you.
A quick search online may lead you right to it. The first thing to look at in the report is your water source. Is it a lake, a river, or local wells? The contaminants present in your water will vary according to the source.
If you have well water, then you want to start by buying an extensive water test. Not at Home Depot. You look for a test by a certified lab. I like the Watercheck by National Testing Labs.
It tests for 83 items and tells you what you need to know. If you have staining or odor issues you would add to the basic test.
Surface water will have higher levels of certain contaminants, in many case those will depend on what’s upstream. Look upstream? On a map if you have to. What do you see? Are there cities? Farms? Or does your water start in pristine wilderness? If there are cities upstream you’ll have pharmaceuticals in your water.
If farms, you’ll have nitrates and unregulated pesticides. These contaminants are not regulated by USEPA and therefore they won’t be listed in your report. But they’ll be there for sure. That’s why we start by looking at the water source.
Well water is subject to more localized impacts. To assess what might be in your well, take a look around.
The landscape will give you some idea what type of contaminants you may have. Are there livestock? Farming? Homes with septic tanks? A river or wetlands? What kind of rock underlies the area?
Next, look at the list of regulated contaminants in your water. These will be listed in the report. When you look at these you may also want to look them up on google to see which type of filter removes them.
And in some cases Wikipedia can give you a nice summary of the health impacts. For instance the danger of radon in drinking water is that you inhale it. The radon then decays to lead in your lungs potentially leading to lung cancer.
Take stock of the listed contaminants and decide which you would like to remove. Some may be harmful while others may be listed that aren’t bad, like sodium or calcium at low levels.
Some, like arsenic or nitrates may be harmful at levels lower than the amount allowed by EPA. As you review the contaminants set a goal as it relates to your health.
Make a list of the contaminants you want to remove. It is the list of contaminants that determines what you need to filter them out.
Now you begin to hone in on your home water purification system. Some contaminants, like iron or hardness, are better removed from the whole house.
This is also true of chlorine or chloramine and the trihalomethanes. You can inhale or absorb these in the shower.
Other contaminants are not practical to remove from the whole house. Uranium, nitrates, high dissolved solids.
These are all contaminants that have to be addressed using reverse osmosis at the kitchen sink. Based on the list of contaminants in your water your system begins to take shape.
You can use resources like the internet to learn the ways that USEPA identifies as effect to remove each contaminant.
There are a number of pitfalls if you stray too far from official sources of information. May water treatment dealers make false claims about what their products do. Some companies do in home demos and offer a sale price if you buy right then.
Others offer online sales with products that are physically inferior and to small to be effective. NSF certification is another misleading factor.
Products are often certified for a very limited function yet they are portrayed as doing much more. It’s tricky to navigate the many pitfalls set for consumers.
Keep it simple: what type of filter or purifier removes the contaminants in YOUR water. Nothing else you read online matters at this point.
From this information you decide what type of filter you may need to filter the water for the whole house. And you may or may not need additional filtration at the kitchen sink.
Or your particular set of contaminants may be addressed most effectively with a kitchen water filter alone. Great!
Then you must finally settle on a vendor. This too is tricky. I think it comes down to two factors. The first in knowledge. Does the person you’re dealing with know what he or she is talking about? The other factor is trust.
Is this a person you think will have your back if you need support? Are you even buying from a person or just clicking a link on a website? Buyer beware of that.
Keep in mind that you have no idea what you are looking for. If you’ve followed the process outlined above you have arrived at a set of components that will make up your home water purification system.
Being able to discern what is inside of a system you read about or how it actually functions is where you come to rely on those factors of knowledge and trust.
If you follow this process you’ll buy the home water purification system that solves the unique problems with water in your home.
Live long and stay healthy!
