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Best Drinking Water Filters For Your Home

By: Trent Barrett If you're tired of shelling out hundreds of dollars a year for bottled water, or if you are looking for a cheap alternative to your not-so-great tap water, you should look into getting a drinking water filter. There are several different kinds of filters for sale today, each with pros and cons. One is certain to work well for your drinking water needs.

The cheapest drinking water filter is probably the basic activated carbon filter, like Pur faucet filters. The filter connection is in the $30 range, the filter replacements about half that price. These filters work by forcing water through an activated carbon filter. The activated carbon attaches itself to different impurities in the water, holding them in the filter while the purified water continues on. These filters are primarily to filter out living contaminants like cryptosporidium and bacteria, though they also filter out some inorganic contaminants. Minerals stay in your water.

If you want to remove other contaminants like chlorine or lead, you need to move up a level, to an reverse osmosis drinking water filter. These filters are very different from the carbon filters; they install under your counter, and your water generally comes from a second faucet that draws from the reservoir of purified water created by the osmotic filter. Ordinary tap water enters the filter at the back, often runs through a carbon filter, and then goes through a series of osmotic filters that allow pure water in, but block everything else. Water that still has contaminants gets rinsed out of the filter system later, and the purified water goes to the reservoir for use. These filters are so powerful they can filter salt out of ocean water, and in fact were first invented to use on submarines to provide a consistent supply of drinking water during long voyages.

Reverse osmosis drinking water filters are very slow, but produce a pretty good quantity of water in the reservoir, and it is easily of bottled-water quality. You can figure on your osmotically-purified water costing you about five cents a gallon in most places, a large improvement on buying it in the store. Water that is rejected should be directed into your gray water storage if you have one, where it can be sprayed on your garden and lawn.

Ultraviolet drinking water filter systems are often added at the end of reverse osmosis filters and other types of water filters to eliminate living contaminants like bacteria from your water. These work by shining powerful UV light into your water, killing everything in the water before it reaches your faucet. These are particularly good additions to reverse osmosis water filters; biological contaminants are one of the few things that can get through these filters, and a single plasmodium can contaminate your entire reservoir.

Another type of drinking water filter commonly used is the ceramic filter. This uses something called diatomaceous earth, a natural silicon filter, to capture the contaminants in your water as they pass through in much the same way a carbon filter captures them. The resulting water is on a par with any carbon-filtered water.

Your perfect water filter depends on your tastes and budget. Spend a lot on bottled water? The osmotic is probably for you. Just want to filter out your tap water? A ceramic or carbon drinking water filter will probably be just fine.