Water Filters

What is the best faucet water filter to buy? Thanks.

The best is the one that removes all of whatever is in the water that you have to remove.

So what and how much of it is in your water?

On city water, none.

The biggest con of all time. Second only to anything with ions in it.

Tap water is great.

Faucet water filter

I installed a Pur FM-9500 3-stage water filter 2 years ago. We use city water and at first I could not tell the difference between filtered and unfiltered. But after a couple of weeks, I could discern the chlorine taste and odor in the unfiltered and the lack thereof in the filtered. The downside is that it takes about 2-3 minutes to fill a quart pitcher and also, there are leaks between the unit and the faucet, and leaks at the seams between the parts of the unit. After I use up the last of 4 replacement filters (a filter last about 4 mos.) I will shop around for a filter that filters faster and is leak proof! Before this, I had an Omni whole-house filter but the plastic housing kept getting hairline cracks after a few years use. After 2 failures I gave up on them. I believe in filtering drinking water because it taste better and the filters look cruddy when I take them out.

I use the PUR faucet-mounted filters as well.

In my house, for some reason they start to leak after about a year so I just replace the whole unit.

While it's not absolutely necessary to filter city tap water, I like to think that eliminating some of the organic compounds (like pesticides and pharmaceutical products which seem to be in most metropolitan water supplies), is a good thing.

What Pur filter are you using that removes pharmaceuticals?

When it comes to good filters, a faucet tip type is a toy, marketed to filter dollars out of your wallet.

And anyone simply improving taste by removing chlorine, should be aware that that is not what harms you, it's the THMs (DPBs) that do you in. That's trihalomethanes and disinfection by products (of chlorine) if they are present in your water.

BTW, all waters contain invisible dirt that can be removed by a filter, but that 'dirt', it can't hurt you. If you are worried about that, you should be walking around breathing through an air filter, air is much dirtier than your water and what you breath goes right into your blood stream; dirt in water doesn't.

I don't know for a fact that any water filter removes pharmaceuticals, but figure that if they remove many other organic compounds, they may reduce these as well.

PUR's web site has NSF-certified testing results showing reductions of many contaminants:

http://store.purwaterfilter.com/faucmounsysn.html


Is this not a valid way to test filter performance?

Maybe 1% of all the filters on the market are "Certified" by the NSF and the WQA.

That doesn't mean non-certified filters don't do as well or better than the much more expensive Certified filter. And companies and sales people use the certification to sell them but... tell me how many of the listed contaminates at that link are found above the EPA MCL in any 'city' water system. Next to none, but look at all the PUR faucet tip filters that are sold and the cost of them because people make incorrect assumptions about their water quality.

America probably has the highest quality water of any nation on earth. A filter gives the uninformed a warm'n fuzzy feeling because as a society we seem to have lost the ability to think. Notice how the word THINK is used so little today? And since most of us live indoors, safely away from nature, we are losing are ability to judge acceptable risks. I've watched this happen over the last 45 years since the advent of pervasive TV advertising (and women's lib).

And now we have billions of dollars being spent on bottled water and everywhere we go people in the hundreds and thousands are walking around sucking on a bottle of commercially bottled water, "feeling" that it is better than what comes out of the 'tap'. But little do they know that 90% of all bottled water is TAP water with a slick label on the bottle and a great ad campaign featuring A LOT of fresh OUTDOOR scenery... now that's funny.

As to testing, see if what you want to remove from the water is actually in the water, install a filter that is said to remove or reduce it and then test a sample of teh water. That is the only accurate test of any filter.

I've used under cabinet carbon filters for years, but I recently bought a Reverse osmosis unit on sale for $130.

I have well water with some iron bacteria smell and the unit cleans the water really well.

The only problem is that the unit was flushing about 8 times more water down the drain than it was producing. I flattened the "capillary tube" some so it's now a more sane 1 gallon down the drain for each filtered gallon it produces.

The carbon filters worked good for taste, but I need "mineral free" or distilled water for liquid cooled equipment.

question about leaks from 1/4" poly tubing

Fudog said:

What is the best faucet water filter to buy? Thanks.

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Reverse osmosis is the best and most cost effective. Only distilled is better, but is very expensive. The city water here has 360 TDS, very high and lots of bad stuff. The RO unit reduces the water to 10 TDS. I've used only distilled or RO water for the last 30 years and it's much better than tap. You should be able to get a good RO unit for $120 to 150 with shipping.

I hope someone can help to answer a question. I'm replacing the auto shut off value on my unit and the 1/4 inch plastic tubing keeps leaking at the fittings. The plastic fittings are the type that you push in to release. Otherwise they're supposed to be snug, but they're not. They keep leaking. I've cut off any parts with scratches and tried to make sure the tubing is as round as possible.

Any suggestions to keep them from leaking?

TDS is Total Dissolved Solids, it is not harmful and the EPA MCL is 500 ppm. So 360 ppm TDS is not bad or harmful.

And distilled water is not as good as RO, all TOCs and VOCs go right through a distiller, UNLESS it has a carbon post filter; many don't.

If your fittings are leaking, and you've trimmed the end of the tubing and still have leaks, you need new fittings. The internal o-ring in the fittings are probably bad. Or your water pressure could be too high.

Bill Arden said:

The only problem is that the unit was flushing about 8 times more water down the drain than it was producing. I flattened the "capillary tube" some so it's now a more sane 1 gallon down the drain for each filtered gallon it produces.

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The waste water to good ratio should be 4:1 to 6:1. Any less than that will reduce the life of the RO membrane. Higher is better for the membrane but wastes water. I aim for 5:1 on mine.

After posting here I took a good look at the push fittings and noticed they have "O" rings deep inside of them. I'd thought the plastic tubing was in all the way but was able to push it in farther, past the rings, confident this would work and it did. NO leaks after that.

TDS stands for the total dissolved solids in the water. The TDS in the town that I live in, which is probably as high a quality as any, contains the following substances. There are of course many more things in the water that are NOT listed in the city water report. Distilled doesn't get out everything from the water, but it's close, and much better than having such as remains, plus all of the following plus whatever else is in there and not measured.

Aluminum
Arsenic
Asbestos
Boron
Calcium
Chloride
Chromium VI
Copper
Fluoride
Haloacetic Acids
Iron
Lead
Magnesium
Manganese
Nitrate
Nitrites
Perchlorate
Potassium
Sodium
Sulfate
Trichloroethylene (TCE)
Trihalomethanes
Uranium
Vanadium

Water is called the universal solvent because it dissolves so many things it comes in contact with. So all waters contain a lot of things but... the amount of each of those things that are dangerous is what matters. You don't list any amounts.

All of those things, good or bad, make up the TDS of a water.

johnlvs2run said:

The city water here has 360 TDS, very high and lots of bad stuff. The RO unit reduces the water to 10 TDS.

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The TDS is 360 from the tap.

The city lists a range of 410 to 790 and an average of 589.

johnlvs2run said:

The waste water to good ratio should be 4:1 to 6:1. Any less than that will reduce the life of the RO membrane. Higher is better for the membrane but wastes water. I aim for 5:1 on mine.

Click to expand...

I read someplace that it can be brought down to 1:2 provided that a manual full flow valve is added to flush the membrane out.

I'm going to bring it back up to around 4:1 for now.

It just seemed to never turn off when I first connected it up. This was possibly due to my lower water pressure. or maybe the "auto shut off" valve needed to be used a few times to "loosen up".

The ASO valve needs a good 1 pound check valve to work properly.
My system was losing way too much water and running constantly due to a lack of this.

I installed a much better check valve plus new ASO and now the system shuts off completely.