10 Easy Tips to Select Water Filters

  1. Determine if your community uses chlorine or chloramine as the disinfectant. Health Risks by Chloramine in Water
  2. Determine if your municipality fluoridates the water.
  3. Learn if there are any violations in your water supply.
  4.  All three can be learned by reviewing your town’s Annual Water Quality Report, calling your water supplier – or by contacting Friends of Water.
Tips to seect Water Filters

Get contaminants out!

4.   Select a vendor who presents real information – not just self-serving propaganda. Use your discrimination!

5.    If a vendor claims that their type of filters are “the only way” that anything can be removed, don’t trust that vendor. They are either badly misinformed or intentionally misleading you.

6.   Be wary of “guaranteed to remove 100%” of anything. That statement is too general. For example, if something is removed 100% when it is at one level, that doesn’t mean 100% will be removed at any level. Water flow rates can affect results. Age of the filter may affect results. Water chemistry is complex.

7.   Sorry, but while certifications can be an indicator, you should not overly rely on them. The level of effectiveness for certification is pretty low. They are very expensive to get done and it’s wasteful to get the same media tested over and over in different configurations.

8.  Charts of effectiveness provide some input. But don’t overly rely on them, either. Water chemistry is very complex and things vary over time.

9.   Don’t buy filters that waste a lot of water when there are good solutions available that don’t waste water. An occasional backwash might be okay. In this era of drought and threats to our water supplies, wasting large percentages of water isn’t okay. In most situations, you can get top filtration without backwashing.

10.  Don’t buy filters that remove all of the trace elements that the body needs when there are solutions available that don’t do that. Systems that take them out and then put some back are better than not at all. But why do it wrong and then try to undo the damage? You can get top filtration without removing essential minerals.

BONUS TIPS

  1. Use your intuition. You will not understand all the complexities of water and water filtration in a couple of week’s research on the internet. Yes, get a sense of what is going on, but don’t kid yourself that you’ll understand all the complexities. With a background in water filtration and running Friends of Water since 2006, we are still learning every week. You are selecting a vendor, not just a filter.
  2. Get filters that do a great job protecting you from the categories of contaminants: Heavy metals, organic contaminants, chemical contaminants, odor and taste. check our Whole House Water Filters
  3. Make sure you get filters that address the additional specific requirements for your water, which in municipalities means chlorine or chloramine, and fluoride or not.
  4. If you are on a well, don’t guess. Get the water tested and send us the test results for review and filter recommendations.  The tests should be of a wide spectrum, not just a couple of contaminants.  Water chemistry is complex, and we can’t know what is best without a good picture of the water.

For more general information, please click on Water Filter FAQ. You can also Check Water Filter Certificates and Lab Test Results

Also check 9 Often Incorrect Statements about Water Filters| Reverse Osmosis

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Friends of Water is a family-owned and family-run business founded in January 2006. We work to save water, filter water and celebrate water.

  • In Business for 19 years
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