Shall I buy a whole house water filter or a kitchen water filter. Once you’ve decided to purchase a filter to improve your water one decision you’ll be faced with is your choice of buying a whole house water filter or a kitchen water filter or water purifier. In this case I’m using the term water filter to describe a simple set of filters intended to remove chlorine, chloramine, and a few metals such as fluoride. A water purifier adds the component of reverse osmosis treatment to also remove a wide range of metals, nitrates, and dissolved solids (tds). While budget will be an important factor you should also be aware of the limitations and effectiveness of each type of water filtration system.
For instance if you take baths or have children that take baths and you don’t wish to be bathing in water containing carcinogens then a whole house water filter is the only way to remove chlorine and whole house water filters are more effective than shower filters. Half of your chlorine exposure in a day comes from the shower or bath. The warm water opens the pores in your skin allowing the chlorine to penetrate your skin.
It’s also nice to be able to drink from every faucet in the house, although a whole house water filter may not enable you to do that, depending on what’s in your water.
Depending on the contaminants in your water, the choice may not be so simple. Many of my customers have both a whole house water filter and a kitchen water purifier or water filter. Some contaminants in drinking water cannot be removed using a whole house water filter. Or they can’t be removed at a reasonable price. Therefore the most common solution to this dilemma is the use of a whole house water filter to remove chlorine, chloramine, their carcinogenic byproducts and herbicides. The kitchen water filter is then used to further remove any traces of chloramine and to remove or reduce fluoride, arsenic, and barium. If you have radioactive metals in your water or high total dissolved solids then a kitchen water purifier would be used in place of a kitchen water filter. When used appropriately either will produce a really high quality water for drinking and cooking.
Some contaminants can only be removed by a kitchen water purifier. Nitrates, fluoride and many of the radioactive metals require the use of reverse osmosis. Total dissolved solids can only be reduced using reverse osmosis. And cities that use chloramines to treat the water often require both whole house and kitchen water filters because chloramines are so hard to remove.
But if you’re faced with a choice, the place to begin is with a kitchen water filter and a shower filter. This will provide you high quality water for cooking and drinking and you can stop buying bottled water or drinking chlorinated water. Then save up your money for an awesome whole house water filter like my Urban Defender.
Once again though I want to encourage you to start the process by looking at your city’s water quality report or if you use well water start with a water test.
You can check out the equipment I offer at:
Sweetwater’s Water Purification Systems
