3 Important Reasons to Filter Your Water

Cities spend much money and effort cleaning the water that enters your tap. Water treatment agencies add chlorine to kill harmful pathogens and fluoride to help clean your teeth on top of all the filters and cleaning systems the water goes through. However, even all this effort can leave harmful chemicals in the water. Find out the three important reasons you should filter your water.

Clear Water Isn’t Always Clean

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When you look at a glass of water from the tap, you may think it looks clean. However, the water in your pipes has been on a long journey before and after it travels through your city’s water purifying system. This system doesn’t always pick up all the contaminants that dissolve in water, contaminants that can cause cancer or other diseases in humans. 

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates how much of these contaminants can exist in the water supply, but you still could be left drinking some contaminants. Additionally, not every exotic chemical is on the EPA’s list.

Tap Water Can Be Hazardous to Fish

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A small amount of chlorine and ammonium can kill pathogens but leave humans unharmed. But what if you need water for an aquarium? A little chlorine can do much harm to a fish that weighs less than a pound. For this reason, companies create water purifiers made specifically to remove chlorine and other dangerous chemicals from tap water so that you can safely add it to a fish aquarium. Of course, you’ll also want a regular aquarium filter to keep the existing water in the tank clean.

Home Filters Can Do a Better Job

City water purification systems have to clean millions of gallons of water every day, so they need filtration systems that can keep up with this rate without costing much money. By comparison, home filtration systems have to worry only about one home or one faucet. As such, you can afford to get a more efficient filtration system. Most filters fall into one of the three following categories:

• Reverse osmosis is a system that uses air pressure to push water through a thin membrane. This membrane blocks the most harmful chemicals, but the process has a limited speed and a high cost.
• Ion exchange is better known as water softening. This household filter is common in areas where water is “hard” and full of calcium and other minerals. Using salts full of positive ions, this system removes negative ions such as calcium and “softens” the water.
• Activated carbon is a filter that comes full of charcoal. Activated carbon can block and attract all types of ions, pathogens, and other chemicals that don’t belong in the water. This filtering method is less common than reverse osmosis but is also cheaper.

Filtered water is good for people, fish, and pets. Not every community has poor water quality such as what exists in Flint, Michigan, but you can stay healthier by filtering the water you use to drink and shower in.

 

References http://themiraclemachine.net/