Testing Water Filters

Thats scare mongering, the alternative medicine crowd likes to whine about how you “need” the minerals in hard water but they are not a necessary nutrient. Also you don’t have to remove them either, they are safe to consume.

As long as your local tap water is safe to drink then your good to go. A big if in some areas.
The taste/odour concerns are a thing in many cities and an activated carbon filter that can remove these aesthetic complaints is great but not necessary from a safety perspective.

Guys, just like we all know the flashlight with the highest lumens is not always the best flashlight, can we agree that the water with the least amount of dissolved solids is not always the best water? Are we in agreement with this statement? Can we also agree that some dissolved solids are good for you and that removing them would be a bad thing? Can we agree on that statement?

No, i cannot agree on these things.

The minerals that cause hardness are not vital to humans (nor are they unique to hard water) and we don’t add them to the water in places that naturally have softer water becasue their citizens are not suffering from lack of hard water.

They may have some moderate benefits but even that is tenuous.

Sorry, zoulas, but not everyone's going to agree with those statements.

I am one of them.

Do some research on the subject if you don't believe Bort.

And Bort beat me to the punch again!

+1

Bort is sly :innocent:

The main benefit of filtering is taking out bacteria,sometimes viruses, and sometimes stuff like metals and volatiles. Dissolved solids sort of correlate with removing that stuff but the only way to know for sure is to test directly. If Project Farm only tested for dissolved solids, that’s not such a good test. NSF tests are apparently quite thorough. One of the red flags about Berkey is their refusal to undergo NSF testing. They answer with lame misdirection if you ask about it.

The problem here - and I generally like his work because it's fun if not accurate (he isn't always...) - is that he's just doing a random comparison, mixing filters with purifiers and just giving them a go with no real goal or education. I suppose it's useful to watch but in the end every person needs to assess their own needs and then get educated about it and go from there. When I saw him doing the dye, that just made me cringe and wonder why he was doing that at all.

Heavy metals and carbon....extremely limited and most won't do much at all because a) the carbon is loose and/or thin walled, and b) the dwell time is insufficient. Can be helpful if there are concerns with old copper lines that were sweated with lead solder, etc, but some of the more serious metal concerns really need an entirely different approach (selenium (not truly a metal), chromium, mercury...).

Most of these are only good for improving taste/odor or at least that's all they should be expected to do safely and reliably.

Getting into filters for microbiological/potable water is a whole other subject and there is a ton of misinformation out there, plus a vastly widened market that is mostly not regulated.

This is one of his videos where he misses the mark and shows that he doesn't always know the subjects he tackles...but I always admire his creativeness and methodology for layman testing. Does a good job there usually.

NSF is what's there but they have issues. They caught a ton of flak for it in the 80s and are still mostly based on the business side of things rather than the consumer side. Some of what they say (I assume they still say...did as of just a few years ago) goes against some standard lab procedures and definitions. One of them being the misuse of the term "absolute" with a great many media types/applications. Take NSF with a big grain of salt and apply it only to convenience filters for the home and look for additional sourcing when it comes to wells or waters that are not from municipal systems.

I’m going to say some things that may seem and are contradictory.There is a lot to consider with water filtration. I think that Project Farm does a really good job on most subjects. I don’t think he talks too fast and I don’t find his voice annoying. I think this video oversimplified things and is misleading to a lot of people. I think that my comments above and others here are oversimplifying things. Many people don’t know what contaminants may be in their water and do want a way to remove as many contaminants as possible. The Zero Water filter and the Berkey and some form of reverse osmosis probably are a good choice for “some” people with municipal water. Most people don’t know what to test for or how to go about testing in a cost-effective manner and it really isn’t practical for most people. Municipal suppliers are required by law to provide their test results to consumers but many don’t make it easy to find or understand and not all items are required to be tested for every year. Many water systems may have issues in some parts of their system versus other parts and they may have various wells or locations where they get water from that may supply different parts of their system. So the test results may not fully apply to the water that you are receiving. I suspect that 10 to 20% of people just find it easier to buy bottled water. And for some of them that might be their best choice. Bottled water is a another complicated subject. You should know where your water is coming from and have a rough idea of what is in it. The bottom line is I would recommend at least trying to remove the chlorine from most municipal water. Most of the above is related to water in the US. I know some places in Europe are getting away from chlorine. I don’t know too much about other parts of the world other than a lot of places in India have a lot of arsenic.

Just letting the water sit in open air for an hour lets most of the chlorine boil off. I used to have a recipe for making bottled water at home. You fill the bottle with tap water, then wait overnight before putting the cap on. Leaving the cap off overnight lets the chlorine escape so the water tastes better.

The absence of something in the water is never a bad thing. You obviously want less of what can harm you. Less of what benefits you doesn’t mean it’s harmful. Consider what dissolved solids are missing from bottled water… and the argument is immediately destroyed.

i only drink distilled water for the past 25+ years—a gallon per day of just plain pure water with no minerals please.

Use it to make my coffee and the coffee makers last forever without all the corrosive chemicals and reactions. Look inside your hot water heater the next time it fails to see all the minerals. Look inside the boiler of an espresso machine to see destruction if tap water is used.

don’t need any hard water extra calcium minerals to form stones in my kidneys;

don’t need any fluoride for which the body has no metabolic functional usage (i brush my teeth with fluoride toothpaste but spit it out), its a shame they poison the water supply with that stuff in the name of “modern” dentistry; and its a shame that they sell a version of distilled water with fluoride added back in and market it to parents of young kids. And 100% grape juice that you would expect to be healthy is loaded with extra fluoride from the water they use to mix the concentrate. Too much Fluoride will cause white spots to form on kids teeth.

also don’t need any chloride, iron, copper, lead or mercury, etc—yep just don’t need to drink any of that.

You do want minerals in the coffee water as they affect the coffee taste. You can even get packets of mineral powder to add to the water, and there is a whole book about it, “Water for Coffee” by Christopher Hendon, and Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood. Book review:

There is descaler (Urnex etc.) that you can get for your coffee pot, to clean out the built up minerals once in a while.

That’s some interesting reading, i might try adjusting my water for coffee to see if i can tell the difference.

When i was a kid i bought a carbide lamp and plastic helmet to use in spelunking, crawling around in small caves and sinkholes. What a mess carrying the carbide gravels and water for refills compared to the ease and efficiency of lithium battery LED lights of today.

Later as a college puke i built a clear plexiglass test fixture to measure the rate of stalactite formation by leaching carbonic acid (water charged with CO2) across a bed of limestone rocks. It seems that the formations have a central tube like a straw that lets the liquid pass thru the middle, then it drips and precipitates out the minerals on the tip and outer surface.

Also built a clear plexiglass honeybee hive that was mounted on a swivel arm inside the lab classroom with a flexible hose to outdoors, so we could watch them work, follow the queen bee, etc. Fun things with plexi…

Later still as a working stiff i was doing espresso machine repairs, service and installations, so i have drank my fill of some good coffee, and seen my fill of some fouled up boiler tanks and plumbing due to all them good minerals.

Europe may not put fluoride in their water; the US does as a way to “help” our teeth and dispose of a nasty by-product of aluminum production. i think folks can take care of their teeth with fluoride toothpaste since it is the surface contact between the tooth and the F ion that replaces the Ca ion in the enamel; it has no dental effect from within the body. Why must the government poison the water supply with fluoride when everyone has access to toothpaste and fluoride rinse products?

What kind of filter removes fluoride— that would be one to find, but none exist except distillation.

In addition to bacteria and viruses, don’t forget about the necessary benefit (with the right filter) of removing parasites, like cryptosporidium and giardia, which are in the natural water sources of almost the entire planet now, even in the wilderness. If you go backpacking/camping anywhere, and you obtain your water from a source found in nature, you need a water treatment system that can remove or deactivate the parasitic organisms, many of which are encased in hard cysts that are resistant to many treatments.

I grew up in one of the first municipalities of the USA to have fluoride added to the water system, and I am very grateful for that. They actually added too much to the water system, and I have mild white stains in my teeth to show for it (not noticeable by others), but I was more than compensated for that with teeth that have not had any cavities in 59+ years. No harmful health effects have been noted from the fluoride added to drinking water systems - it is not “poisoning” the water supply.

I had thought of those as bacteria, but if they are not, then ok, add them too. Thanks for bringing this up.

I would not use any of the activated carbon filters for biologicals in water, they are aesthetic filters, to be used on water that is already safe to drink (either municipally treated or tested well water).

Even the RO filters have many stage filtering and the first stages are usually activated carbon. So again i would use it on already safe water.

Bort: I agree 100%. I didn’t intend to suggest that an activated charcoal “filter” alone would be effective at removing or deactivating parasites, viruses, or bacteria.

Fair enough, i was replying to the concept and not you specifically.