i want something, don't want to break the bank but sure would like it to filter out the gunk. anyone have one they love, reliable info on them, anything? thanks kids!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/06/2010 07:00PM by coco.

Well...my feeling on this is that the good ones are costly...sadly...

Are you on city/well/spring water?

We have spring water, which has been tested & has run-off from local fields, etc. We've used the Berkey filter for years & are happy w/ it. It is touted as being "the best"...

They have a couple of different filter elements to choose from, depending on what type of water you have.

Have some "hi-tech" whole house system that gets rid of the worst of the nasties...good enough for shower/dishes I guess, but not for drinking...

We are "in between" air purifiers at this point...just rely on a lot of house plants!!!

Thanks for the info. Do you use the additional flouride filter? How do you know this is a great filter? Just curious if you'd read an independant review or a study or something. It's a lot to invest but if it's a really good product I don't mind supporting the company. I'm so tired of all the garbage out there, it's depressing that most things are not made to last even a year. I only want to buy this thing ONCE! xo

There is a company called Waterwise and they have distillers, which seems like the most purified water (and you can restructure the water if you want). I used to receive a catalog by them and most of their distillers were in the $200 range.

The black filter elements are the most powerful, although they can clog easily if you have a lot of sediment in the water (well or spring water). I need to get the fluoride filters, that is on my list.

Although we have spring water, we usually get bottles filled at my moms house, which is city water. Then we bring them home & run through the filter. It is a pain, but we figure it is about the healthiest ch9ice at this point...

The Berkey name has been around for years and I have read a good bit about them & other systems as well. This model is/was used by the Red Cross & other relief organizations in disaster situations where no potable water can be found.

They (Berkey) claim you can filter pond or swap water and it will be safe to drink. I am sure there are independent studies out there if you search for them.

Filtering the water & having it tested yourself would be a good idea - I may do that sometime. I did it once in the past w/ another brand (Brita, sorry) and the water was in horrible shape, especially nitrite/nitrate levels. Lead was up there too...

I am surprised other members haven't chimed in on this...I am sure others here use filter systems.

They sound great and they make a sport bottle that can filter pond water, amazing when you think about it. I'd take that travelling and camping, you could drink from the tap anywhere and only have to carry an empty light little plastic bottle around.

I am not sure about distilling, I like the idea but the machine uses a lot of energy and if this filter does very well at taking out contaminants that's good enough for me. Will work in a power outtage and can be taken and used anywhere. The smallest unit more than meets our needs, we are a family of one regular and two small sized ppl .

Coco, I was really thinking of a non-electric distiller: [www.everythingkitchens.com]

It is powered by a gas stove or open fire. They say it's not available until further notice and cost over $400. Maybe there's another brand you can find with the same construction. Good luck.

A solar one would be cool too...

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Oh, mirror in the sky
What is love?
Can the child within my heart rise above?
Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?

Has anyone read The Life Of Pi? In it he builds a solar distiller to clean ocean water for drinking. In the summer I'd be willing to give that a try. Sun powder super clean water, already "reenergized" by the sun. Cool!

yup, those are exactly the kind of solar distillers im talkin about really potentially cool if one has a good safe place to store excess water produced for later use...

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Oh, mirror in the sky
What is love?
Can the child within my heart rise above?
Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?

Hey, check this out
[santevia.com]

They have a travel drink container like the klean kanteen that has a built in ph filtery type thing. What do you think of it?

Does anyone have any experience with the Santevia Gravity Countertop system?

(from Coco's link above you can find it in the products menu)

I don't need to worry about floride, which it apparently does not filter.

I'm just tired of buying copious amounts of bottled water.

Old thread yes, trolling, no.

I would get 10 inch filters like this one:

[www.amazon.com]

and a 10 inch filter canister like this one:

[www.amazon.com]

Install it under a cabinet. Then you need to add a water faucet. Shop around.

You can shop for other more expensive 10 inch filters. Some filters are like $100.

Thanks Panchito, I'll check stuff out.

Any recommendations for a whole house system? I know they can be expensive. . . but maybe it would be better to have cleaner water for the whole house.

For a whole house you can get the same but bigger (20 inches instead of 10). Also the hole to the filter housing needs to be as big as possible to avoid low pressure/flow point. I would not get reverse osmosis as it will leach out minerals and stuff. Minerals like Mg and Ca are needed in washer machines. The only time you have to worry about minerals is with water heaters. Once heated, the minerals may create sediments in the hot water lines. So get a hardness strip and check the mineral levels of your house. Minerals are only deposited with flow. So if you rarely use the hot water, they'll never piled up. It should be around 100 ppm (good). Go from there to see the requirements of your house

Thanks, guys, this resurrected discussion helped fill in some gaps of knowledge I had myself. My plan is to get a whole house system before the end of the year; I am leaning towards Crystal Quest.


klandestine,

Quote

Old thread yes, trolling, no.

LOL!

Do you guys use TDS meters (TDS = total dissolved solids) to check your (filtered) water? I think for shower purposes it would not be very essential, but for drinking water it is nice to know that filters are due to be changed once TDS starts creeping up above 0.

I first heard of these meters when we got our marine fish tank with the obligatory Nemo, as it turned out marine aquariums are best kept using reverse osmosis (RO) plus deionised (DI) water, so we bought the unit too and the meter. Manufacturers do put the usage times on their filters, but in the real world these times vary greatly depending on the type/amount of usage one puts their unit through.

(For example together with RO/DI unit we use a booster pump which pumps collected waste water through the filter once more, thus minimising the waste, and so filters need to be changed more often.)



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 04/17/2012 02:32PM by chat.

Hey Chat. If you have a PH meter, I would check the ph level of the osmosis water. I heard it is like 6 (acidic and corrosive). In comparison, the bottled spring water from Costco ($00.10) I drink is 8.5 ph (good)

I do have a TDS meter. You can also use water hardness strips. They are sold in aquarium pet stores.

My RO filtered water tests at 5.0, but that's because, being inert, there's nothing in it to react with the pH paper! When I add a bit of Willard Water, which is a mineral supplement, to it, it instantly changes to an 8.0 or higher reading.

Panchito Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hey Chat. If you have a PH meter, I would check
> the ph level of the osmosis water. I heard it is
> like 6 (acidic and corrosive). In comparison, the
> bottled spring water from Costco ($00.10) I drink
> is 8.5 ph (good)


Strictly speaking it's a bit pointless to measure ph of RO water, this is because since RO water by definition is stripped of dissolved solids, it is also stripped of dissolved salts and therefore has extremely low alkalinity. Hence it will quickly get the ph of whatever you add to it - because the lower the alkalinity the less water can resist a ph change.

That's why there is nothing wrong or bad about RO water having low ph. This is a nice article about RO water generally:

[knol.google.com]#

check this out:

[en.wikipedia.org]

If you put water without anything in your body, things move

"Net movement of solvent is from the less concentrated (hypotonic) to the more concentrated (hypertonic) solution, which tends to reduce the difference in concentrations. "

Also, let say that you want to bring down the ph of your body. Guess what? It is not happening drinking ph5 water unless you add powders to change the water.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/17/2012 10:59PM by Panchito.

Panchito Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> check this out:
>
> [en.wikipedia.org]
>
> If you put water without anything in your body,
> things move
>
> "Net movement of solvent is from the less
> concentrated (hypotonic) to the more concentrated
> (hypertonic) solution, which tends to reduce the
> difference in concentrations. "
>

Panchito, can you elaborate on this please, I had a look at the wikipedia article you link but still didn't understand what do you mean by "If you put water without anything in your body, things move" with regard to RO water.




Panchito Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>Also, let say that you want to bring down the ph
> of your body. Guess what? It is not happening
> drinking ph5 water unless you add powders to
> change the water.


I think you're right, RO water will not bring the ph of your body down, but why should it? In other words, why should one want to use plain clean water to bring the ph of their bodies down, wouldn't you rather use appropriate foods etc?

Incidentally I do re-mineralise RO water if drinking it plain (I merely add a tiny bit of very good quality mineral water to it) but not because I want to neutralise ph, since ph of RO water is so unstable it is completely irrelevant. I do this because of the possibility that RO water may have negative effects by diluting electrolytes dissolved in the body water. The latter has not been adequately proven yet so I tend to do it just as a precaution, more so because it costs me virtually nothing.

I would not however go back to ordinary tap or even spring water. By drinking RO water I *know* what I'm putting in my body - clean pure water, with only good ions added to avoid it's aggressiveness but nothing else. The rest of the necessary minerals/vitamins I get through foods and wholefood vitamins/mineral supplement. And the best thing it is extremely efficient, no more buying countless of bottles in order to supply drinking and cooking water for the family, much easier on the environment



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/18/2012 06:47AM by chat.

there was an article a while back of a surgeon using RO water to clean human parts. He was getting the parts bloated or something like that and he had to stop using RO. don't have the time to look it up. But RO water seems to work different in the body than regular mineralized water.

> Panchito, can you elaborate on this please, I had
> a look at the wikipedia article you link but still
> didn't understand what do you mean by "If you put
> water without anything in your body, things move"
> with regard to RO water.


Google something called osmolysis. It is when cells explode (burst out) because of the osmosis force (cells keep taking water till the membrane breaks)

The best water to drink is spring water. I avoid drinking tap water because of the chlorine content. Reverse osmosis and distilled water should also be avoided, but the best way to understand this is to understand the chemistry behind water. Consider type 1 water, which is an ultra pure water. It's so pure that it's actually measured by electrical resistance as opposed to parts per million. Type 1 water is used in laboratories, so you're not going to find it at your grocery store. It's so pure that it can become corrosive, and if poured into a glass, it would actually start eating away at the glass. So the more pure water is, the more aggressive it becomes.

Distilled and reverse osmosis water are not as pure as ultra pure water, but they're still pure enough that they have some aggressiveness to them. That means that it will dissolve more, and not just toxins that it comes into contact with. It will take everything that it comes into contact with, and that includes toxins, vitamins, and minerals. So when you drink reverse osmosis or distilled water, it can leech beneficial vitamins and minerals from the body, and also create an electrolyte imbalance. They found in one study that drinking softer water like reverse osmosis and distilled water can increase the risk of heart disease. They found that it would take away beneficial minerals like magnesium that help prevent heart disease. Another issue with pure waters is that they need to find some way to saturate themselves. If you left open a container of reverse osmosis or distilled water and just let it sit while you monitored the pH, you'll find that it turns acidic. This is because it absorbs gases from the air. So besides leeching vitamins and minerals from the body, it can also turn acidic, causing problems for the enamel of the teeth. So spring water is the best type of water to drink, but if you're going to drink reverse osmosis or distilled, it should be saturated with minerals.

Check out my raw food review blog at rawfoodland.com!

Sorry, half of the above is parrot talk.

No one who has at least some background in science, or had troubled themselves to research it a little bit, would complain that RO water is acidic. Instead they would learn that RO water's ph is unstable, in virtue of the very nature of RO water, and for the same reason irrelevant. Incidentally, this unstable ph is usually in the region of 5-6. Do you ever drink orange juice? It's ph is 3.5, and it is quite buffered. How's your teeth?

Spring water would be great, I would never argue with that, and perhaps in some places/areas you can find/buy a good quality spring water - by good quality I mean spring water which contains only beneficial elements without any nasties. The problem is that sometimes it is more difficult to find such water, and often impractical to buy it because of the increased expense or simple inconvenience. In these cases I think the second best is RO unit in the house. RO unit will produce nice clean water (or at least as clean as you can get in home conditions), to which you add a splash of good quality spring water to put some minerals back and eliminate potential aggressiveness. This way you Know that the water you drink is clean of nasties, and don't take the risk of buying tap water infused with minerals and labelled as 'spring'.

With regard to aggressiveness of RO water (which was not remineralized) there where indeed some studies trying to prove this, but as yet they are unable to find conclusive evidence that plain RO water 'leeches' minerals from human body. Wikipedia lists a recent WHO report which mentions this fact. It is always better be safe that sorry however, and as I said before personally I always re-mineralise RO water before drinking it plain, especially as it is so easy to do. But I believe that a good blogger, when giving a particular information about a product, apart from doing a proper research should mention all relevant facts regarding that information - such as yes, there is a concern but it has not been conclusively proven yet. Otherwise it just sounds like a parrot talk. Or it does so to me anyway.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/20/2012 01:03PM by chat.

This is my science

I don't drink 8 bottles of orange juice a day to keep hydrated, do you?

Spring water: $00.10 16.9FL OZ ph8.5 at Costco. And no need to remineralize



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/20/2012 01:04PM by Panchito.

Good luck with your science, and buying 8 bottles a day of Costco water

Plastic bottles, Panchito?!


nrothgarden, citations please.

Yeah, the plastic bottle makes it "bad." But I can live with that. On the other hand, the convenience of having "good" portable water where ever I go is great. Nothing is perfect.


Tamukha Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Plastic bottles, Panchito?!