If you care about your and your loved ones’ health, a safe source of clean drinking water should be on top of your priorities. Since tap water is treated and inherently not clean, the best way to protect your family is by installing a high quality water filter.

If you are from the GTA and want to perform a free water analysis or purchase your very own Kinetico water filter, contact AQUAREAL: 416-221-1107; http://www.aquareal.com/

The water in your glass has to travel many miles from the main source through pipes, some of them being 70 years old lead ones, meaning different contaminants can get into the stream. The municipal water treatment facilities do their best to neutralize them, by adding chlorine in the water, but they can’t control everything.

There are three main types of contaminants that can be present in your water source:

Inorganic compounds, which include:

• Metalloid ions and metals, like lead, mercury or arsenic. Even if ingested in very small doses, they can pose a high level of danger to your health. There are also traces of calcium and magnesium, which make your water hard. It doesn’t affect your health in a negative manner, but it can clog up your water pipes and cause your appliances that use water to break down faster.
• Nitrates, phosphate, cyanide, sulfate and chloride are the trigger for various afflictions.

Organic compounds are composed of carbon. These include carbon tetrachloride, trihalomethanes, vinyl chloride or benzene, among others. They are used in the plastics industry, in the making of pesticides and solvents, and it is quite easy for them to reach your water supply due to their widespread use.

Microorganisms, the most common being Giardia, Cryptospordium, Legionella and E. colic, especially in untreated well water.

What should you do?

The only way to know for sure what type of contaminant is in your water is by performing a water analysis at a certified lab. When you have the results, you can determine what type of filtration technology is most suitable for you and how much money you’re willing to spend on a water filter.

There are different kinds of filter technologies, each serving various purposes:

• Activated carbon filters that remove certain contaminants like chlorine, iron or pesticides, trapping them when water passes through.

• Reverse osmosis, where water is pushed through a semipermeable membrane that absorbs almost any kind of contaminant. It’s so efficient that it can make salt water drinkable.
• Ion exchange is mostly used in water softeners, which use sodium or potassium salts to lower the amount of minerals in hard water.
• Ultraviolet radiation is a recent water filtering method, and extremely efficient when it comes to killing bacteria, even better than chlorine.

A pitcher filter is the cheapest and the most basic way of filtering your water. The downside is you have to refill it all the time. If you don’t want that, go for an undersink reverse osmosis model for added protection and constant running drinkable water from a second faucet in the kitchen sink. Whole home water filters, the most expensive ones, are installed at the point where water enters the house, leaving no amount of water untreated.