When to Change a Carbon Water Filter to Avoid Health and Plumbing Problems

Having carbon water filtration in your home is one of the simplest and most inexpensive ways to replicate the forces of nature within your home. A carbon water filter works much the same way natural water filtration does. But while nature has ways to deal with the material that filtered out, it all stays within man made filter cartridges. This can cause problems with health and with the proper operation of the filter so it's important to keep up with maintenance.

In nature there is a continual process that removes contaminants from water as is passes through soil. The bacterial contaminants either die or migrate elsewhere out of the soil. Physical particles will get trapped in the natural carbon of the soil while the now clean water makes it through and collects elsewhere.

Since this continual process cannot take place within the carbon filters of your home filtration systems you need to manually replace the cartridges. The frequency of this replacement depends in large part to the brand and the type of cartridge you are using, as well as how much water you pass through the filter. In some cases you will need to replace the filter every few weeks while with other types you can go many months.

The type of filter cartridge that requires the most frequent replacement are the small faucet mounted filters. These are very convenient water filters in that there is no pitcher to fill, but since it is physically smaller the carbon will get used up more quickly by being filled with contaminants. Certain brands of these filters will have an indicator to tell you when the filter needs to be changed, while others lack that feature. If your carbon cartridge does not have this kind of indicator then you should consider changing it at least once each month, or when the water flow decreases noticeably.

With pitcher style water filter systems you can go a bit longer between cartridge replacements. In many cases you can go about three months. This makes it somewhat simpler to remember when to replace the cartridge as you can schedule it to coincide with each quarter of the year. You can also plan to have a year's worth of filters on hand for replacement, and this would only be four filters.

There are also refrigerators with water dispensers that have built in water filtration. With this type of dispenser it's fairly typical that there will be an indicator on the refrigerator door that will indicate when the filter is in need of replacement. While it may be tempting to ignore these warnings and just hit the reset button, there are some very good reason to carry out the recommended replacement.

For the health argument, you don't know for how much longer the filter will be effective. While there is a certain level of safety built in to the time limits on the filter cartridges, you don't really know how long that is and you don't know how long it will be before the contaminants that were filtered out will get back into your water due to the carbon being saturated.

Whole House Water Purifier and Filter Systems

In a reality where greater numbers of people are becoming increasingly conscious of what they physically consume, there has been considerable alarm in regard to the purity of water we drink and use for cooking. Even in so-called developed countries, residential tap water carries various contaminants and may pose worrisome health risks to you and your family. The chemicals that are added during the purification process at the municipal level kill many biological contaminants but come at a possible price to public health in their own right. Much of this serves to fuel the bottled water craze of the past decade, but whole house water purifiers and filters present a much more economical and environmentally friendly alternative to regular tap water and store bought bottled water.

In contrast to faucet attached water filters or pitcher and individual container water filters, a whole house filtering system deals with all the water that enters your home. Whole house filtering systems reduce undissolved sediment and purify your water of contaminants that typically cause foul odor. All of this results in cleaner, better tasting water from your tap. If you're looking to reduce fluoride or dissolved sediments, a reverse osmosis system is generally what you will need to purify your residential water system. There are also ultra violet (UV) water purifying whole house systems that work in conjunction with carbon based filtering systems. This way not only do you kill any bacteria or microbes that may be present in your tap water, but you also benefit from filtering these contaminants from your residential water supply.

The contaminants you wish to eliminate play a deciding factor in determining what whole house water purifier is the best selection for your home. For instance, removing chlorine is relatively straightforward, and a carbon filter of the appropriate size will take care of this issue for your household. Eliminating more elusive contaminants such as fluoride is a completely different animal and can really only be removed effectively and efficiently with a reverse osmosis system. Whole house reverse osmosis systems require a holding tank sized appropriately for your household demand combined with a calcite neutralizing filter to deal with the acidity and corrosion that comes from the reverse osmosis process.

Many individuals install a sediment filter in-line before their carbon filter. Sediment filters are less expensive than carbon filters, and using a sediment filter will lengthen the life of the more costly carbon filters. The most popular sediment filters cleanse water of sediment all the way down to 5 microns, but if this is overkill, there are also very efficient sediment filters that will purify your tap water down to 25 microns of sediment. A good sediment water filtering system will also clear out the presence of rust in your residential water supply.

Many of the water filters on the market are manufactured by only a handful of companies. Second tier companies purchase these water filters in bulk and put their own "brand names" on the filters, even though the water filtration technology may be identical. Consequently, many water filter products are interchangeable, so keep this in mind when shopping for the type of water filter you home requires.

An extremely efficient means of supplementing your regular tap water system is to invest in a whole house system that draws on rainwater runoff as an added residential water supply. Situations and the location of your home will play a significant factor in any decision in going this route, but whole house water purifiers exist on the market that utilize stored rain water for year round water supply. Think of it as your own personal reservoir, where water is stored in a contaminant tank then filtered and purified as needed. After all, this is what municipalities do on a much more massive scale.

Whole house water purifying and filtering systems generally reduce your water pressure and the flow through your plumbing system, but most quality filtering systems allow you to adjust for this type of thing. Once you get to know how whole house water filters work, the health benefits they offer and the cost offset of not purchasing bottled water will make this an easy decision to make for your household.