An Overview of Residential and Commercial Water Filtration Options

Clear and Clean: An Overview of Residential and Commercial Water Filtration

Water Filtration is Necessary for Clean Water

“It is estimated that there are over 85,000 possible contaminants in the water supply. Of these thousands of contaminants, water municipalities test for only roughly 120.”

~ Article in Healing Our World, a publication by the Hippocrates Health Institute

An Overview of Residential and Commercial Water Filtration OptionsWe’re talking about clean water. H2O. Pure aqua. It’s a necessity for life. And there are tens of thousands of possible contaminants potentially present in the water that reaches your home. Municipalities who supply water test for only 120 of those substances. That’s less than two tenths of one percent. Let that sink in. Water may be “tested” to be safe by your water treatment facility for those 120 items, but what about the other 84,880 contaminants?

If you are concerned about your health (and you should be!), filtering your tap water is an easy and cost effective way to decrease illness and increase wellness.

We often have clients ask why certain water filtration methods are not recommended. Many of you have heard about filtration methods or your health care practitioner has recommended a particular method. This article will be a good start toward helping you understand the different methods of water filtration and why we recommend ours over other popular methods. The methods we will discuss today include reverse osmosis, distillation, and our custom filtration.

About Reverse Osmosis

Reverse osmosis is the process of using high pressure to force water through a semi-permeable membrane. It is very effective in removing dissolved salts, minerals, bacteria, and pyrogens. Its pores will block large molecular structures but more dangerous chemicals like pesticides, herbicides, and chlorine are molecularly smaller than water and may pass through. Additionally, because it strips the water of natural minerals that your body needs, it can actually leach minerals from your body (this is also the case with distillation, below). Finally, it wastes a large portion of water that runs through the system and is a very slow process facilitating the need for a holding tank especially if used for whole house filtration.

About Distillation

Distillation is like evaporation: water is heated to create steam and as the steam separates from the contaminants, it leaves the contaminants behind. This process removes contaminants that have a higher boiling point than water, which includes a majority of issues. It will reliably remove bacteria, viruses, heavy metals, and minerals. However, there are some chemicals that have a lower boiling point than water (such as chlorine) and it will not remove those. That being said, this is our second favorite water filtration method because it is very effective at removing harmful substances from your water. However, it will also remove the healthy minerals (as discussed above) and, this is an incredibly slow method. It can take several hours to provide one gallon of clean water. This renders distillation nearly impossible to use for whole house filtration.

Custom Filtration: A Better Option for Clean Water

Our point-of-entry whole house customized filtration targets all the water entering your home so that you don’t have to bathe or brush your teeth in contaminated water. We do not sell you an “off the shelf” system. First we ask you to fill out a questionnaire regarding your needs and any health issues. Second, we obtain the water report from your local water treatment facility to check what issues there are with your water. Generally, at point of entry, you will have a carbon tank to remove chlorine, chloramines and their by-products (called THMs and HAAs). This will reduce these contaminants by at least 98%. Industrial chemicals are reduced by 80 – 95%. We can add heavy metal removing media to remove fluoride, arsenic, lead, copper, chromium and most other heavy metals by 80 – 90%. This will clean the water very effectively for bathing, brushing your teeth, etc. Then, additional filtration is placed at your kitchen sink (ceramic and other upgrades depending on your specific needs) for drinking and cooking which will further reduces, chemicals, parasites, VOCs, metals, and bacteria. Best of all, our kitchen sink filtration removes an incredible 99% of fluoride from your drinking water! This approach provides you with some of the cleanest, healthiest water possible.

What About Water Filtration for Businesses?

Lets talk for a minute specifically about commercial filtration. We are happy to see in recent years many offices and businesses providing water bottle filling stations. This is fantastic because research shows that if we have access to drinking water, we will drink more water. However, did you know, these stations use the word “filtered” but in most cases they are only filtering out only one thing such as lead? We feel this is misleading, but in building biology we feel any attempt to be healthier is progress worth celebrating. At least these stations are helping us to drink more water.

Vital Spaces offers not only systems for your home; we also offer systems for offices and businesses including commercial water bottling stations that offer excellent filtration!