Water filters
You can survive without food for several weeks, because your body will gradually switch to using stored fat and protein to make its energy. But cut off your water supply and you'll be dead within days. Water equals life: it's as simple as that. Around two thirds of your body (as much as 75 percent if you're a baby) is H2O. Even your bones, which you might think are completely solid, contain about 25 percent water. On average, we need 2.4 liters (0.6 gals) of water each day to keep ourselves healthy (though we don't have to drink anything like that much�we get a lot of our water from inside foods). With water so important to our lives, it's hardly surprising we like it clean, pure, and tasty. That's one reason people spend so much money on water filters that can remove any harmful impurities. How do they work�and do we really need them? Let's take a closer look!
How water filters work
Thanks largely to an unusual molecular structure, water is amazingly good at dissolving things. (We look at this in more detailed in our main article on water.) Sometimes that's helpful: if you want to bust the dust from your jeans, simply throw them in your washing machine with some detergent and the water and soap will pull the muck away like a magnet. But there's clearly a downside to this too. All of our water constantly circulates through the environment in what's known as the water cycle. One minute it's rushing through a river or drifting high in a cloud, the next it's streaming from your faucet (tap), sitting in a glass on your table, or flushing down your toilet. How do you know the water you're about to drink�with its brilliant ability to attract and dissolve dirt�hasn't picked up all kinds of nasties on its journey through Earth and atmosphere? If you want to be sure, you can run it through a water filter.
Physical and chemical filtration
Water filters use two different techniques to remove dirt. Physical filtration means straining water to remove larger impurities. In other words, a physical filter is a glorified sieve�maybe a piece of thin gauze or a very fine textile membrane. (If you have an electric kettle, you probably have a filter like this built into the spout to remove particles of limescale.) Another method of filtering, chemical filtration, involves passing water through an active material that removes impurities chemically as they pass through.
Four types of water filters
There are four main types of filtration and they employ a mixture of physical and chemical techniques.
Activated carbon
The most common household water filters use what are known as activated carbon granules (sometimes called active carbon or AC) based on charcoal (a very porous form of carbon, made by burning something like wood in a reduced supply of oxygen). Charcoal is like a cross between the graphite "lead" in a pencil and a sponge. It has a huge internal surface area, packed with nooks and crannies, that attract and trap chemical impurities through a process called adsorption (where liquids or gases become trapped by solids or liquids). But while charcoal is great for removing many common impurities (including chlorine-based chemicals introduced during waste-water purification, some pesticides, and industrial solvents), it can't cope with "hardness" (limescale), heavy metals (unless a special type of activated carbon filter is used), sodium, nitrates, fluorine, or microbes. The main disadvantage of activated carbon is that the filters eventually clog up with impurities and have to be replaced. That means there's an ongoing (and sometimes considerable) cost.
Reverse osmosis
Reverse osmosis means forcing contaminated water through a membrane (effectively, a very fine filter) at pressure, so the water passes through but the contaminants remain behind.
Ion exchange
Ion-exchange filters are particularly good at "softening" water (removing limescale). They're designed to split apart atoms of a contaminating substance to make ions (electrically charged atoms with too many or too few electrons). Then they trap those ions and release, instead, some different, less troublesome ions of their own�in other words, they exchange "bad" ions for "good" ones.
How do they work? Ion exchange filters are made from lots of zeolite beads containing sodium ions. Hard water contains magnesium and calcium compounds and, when you pour it into an ion-exchange filter, these compounds split apart to form magnesium and calcium ions. The filter beads find magnesium and calcium ions more attractive than sodium, so they trap the incoming magnesium and calcium ions and release their own sodium ions to replace them. Without the magnesium and calcium ions, the water tastes softer and (to many people) more pleasant. However, the sodium is simply a different form of contaminant, so you can't describe the end product of ion-exchange filtration as "pure water" (the added sodium can even be problematic for people on low-sodium diets). Another disadvantage of ion-exchange filtration is that you need to recharge the filters periodically with more sodium ions, typically by adding a special kind of salt. (This is why you have to add "salt" to dishwashers, from time to time: the salt recharges the dishwasher's water softener and helps to prevent a gradual build-up of limescale that can damage the machine.)
Distillation
One of the simplest ways to purify water is to boil it, but although the heat kills off many different bacteria, it doesn't remove chemicals, limescale, and other contaminants. Distillation goes a step further than ordinary boiling: you boil water to make steam, then capture the steam and condense (cool) it back into water in a separate container. Since water boils at a lower temperature than some of the contaminants it contains (such as toxic heavy metals), these remain behind as the steam separates away and boils off. Unfortunately, though, some contaminants (including volatile organic compounds or VOCs) boil at a lower temperature than water and that means they evaporate with the steam and aren't removed by the distillation process.
Conclusion
You can see that different types of filtration remove different pollutants�but there's no single technique that removes all the contaminants from water. That's why many home water-filter systems use two or more of these processes together. If you're looking for a home water filter, tread carefully. Bear in mind that you won't necessarily remove all the nasties. Remember, too, that most water filters require some kind of ongoing cost and, without regular maintenance to keep them working properly, can leave your water in worse shape than it was to begin with!
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Wellness Benefits of Water Purification Systems: It is a well-known reality that water purification is the only means to choose eliminating dangerous pollutants and also germs. Why?
It is clinically confirmed that water contamination can be caused by spills, leakages, staining, and also sedimentation. As well as among one of the most common ways that this contamination takes place is through overflow. When this exists, it means that the water is participating in your residence from an additional place.
Therefore, it is crucial that water supply such as a chlorinator or deionization system are made use of in order to eliminate this from reaching your house. However is it additionally important to recognize the other sorts of impurities that our water supply can remove?
For instance, do you understand that deionization filters remove only a few of the chemicals present in your water? Well, those individuals that don't understand anything concerning the different kinds of filtration systems are normally the ones that fall short to understand this fact. Yet these exact same people can attest to the fact that utilizing these sorts of filtration systems can conserve you even more money than they can think of.
An additional wellness benefits that water filtering systems can use is to enhance your heart wellness. The way these systems get rid of chlorine can really cause people to have a much healthier heart than they already do. It is not shocking that people are picking these sorts of filtering systems.
If you are asking yourself if these sorts of purification systems benefit your wellness, they actually benefit your wellness. However, it is additionally real that there are numerous types of purification systems that are not good for your wellness.
A few of the usual forms of hazardous impurities that water supply are not good for are those that contain lead, chlorine, and fluoride. While most of these sorts of purification systems do have their very own system for getting rid of these damaging chemicals, they also get rid of other chemicals too. To put it simply, they not only do not function to clear your body of the contaminations, but they in fact do even more harm than excellent.
One of the worst types of water filtration systems are the ones that use activated carbon filters. These types of filters can really do more damage than good because they catch harmful contaminants such as hefty steels, lead, as well as also pesticides. These types of filters are additionally not appropriate for drinking water.
Currently, there are various other kinds of purification systems that can supply see you wellness advantages, while eliminating the negative impacts of pollutant. They can act as anti-bacterials in addition to boost the taste of water. But certainly, a good water purification system should not be jeopardized with various other sorts of advantages.
The health and wellness benefits that we get from these kinds of filtration systems are numerous. Among the most essential advantages is that it gets rid of chemicals as well as germs that are considered dangerous.
Now you can finally understand why removing unsafe chemicals is just one of the most essential aspects of seeing to it that your water systems give you with health advantages. Just because you do not consume alcohol water, do not neglect that it is the significant resource of your day-to-day nourishment.
So if you actually intend to see some health take advantage of using water purification systems, just remember that it is far better to utilize filtration systems that remove a few of the unsafe chemicals along with the unsafe microorganisms present in your water. As well as certainly, you need to understand the types of contaminants that can impact your health and wellness.
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