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Great Lakes
Article:
How to improve the water quality in
your home
By Lou Manfredini
Home contributor
MSNBC Today show
Posted January 24, 2006
Are you pouring money down the drain? Do-it-yourself
expert and “Today” contributor Lou Manfredini explains
how you can purify the water in your own home.
Water of course is very important to our health. It makes
up on average 60 percent of our body weight. According
to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, the typical family
consumes 300 gallons of bottled water a year. The average
cost of bottled water is $1.25 a gallon. Based on the
price of gas these days, that seems pretty cheap. But
consider the cost of a 20-ounce bottle you’d buy at a
convenience store at, say, 99 cents or higher, and you
can see that the cost of clean drinking water is very
high.
In addition, many argue that the bottled water industry
is loosely regulated and that it’s hard to know what the
quality of that water truly is. While there may be some
merit to that line of thinking, I believe the larger national
beverage companies do a pretty good job of delivering
good quality water.
To help consumers concerned about what they're buying,
the EPA has developed the Safe Drinking Water Information
System (SDWIS), which lists all of the drinking water
facilities across the country (www.epa.gov) Of course
the raw source makes a huge difference. States near the
Great Lakes start with pretty good water before it is
filtered, while many central and southern states have
a poorer quality of source water. Do-it-yourself kits
to test the water quality in your home are now available
to test chemical levels and sediment. These tests cost
less than $15 (www.prolabinc.com) and will give you quick
results as to the overall quality of your drinking water.
Home water-filtration systems have been around for years
and have become even more sophisticated and better at
cleaning up the water we drink. For a small investment,
you can save hundreds of dollars a year and deliver clean
water right in your own home. Keep in mind that a water
filtration system is not the same as a water purification
system. The systems below will not create clean drinking
water from contaminated water like the issues facing victims
of Hurricane Katrina.
There are all different price points when it comes to
these systems. The most economical are the pitcher systems.
They require no plumbing, and are as easy as filling a
pitcher from the tap. One of the leading makers of filtering
pitchers is Brita. Their pitchers will filter out sediment
and reduce chemical levels of chlorine, Benzene, lead,
mercury, and others in your drinking water. And the cost
is less than $30. You will need to replace the filters,
but these pitcher units are by far the best entry point
in filtering drinking water. www.brita.com
A slight step up are the units that screw onto your kitchen
faucet. These filters clean the same contaminants as the
pitcher units, but offer more convenience since there
is nothing to fill. They cost only a little more and also
require filter changes, but they will provide you with
more filtered water at a single or multiple use. www.culligan.com
When it comes to filtering water, the larger the filter
the better unit. Single stage filtering systems are the
next step up; they range in price from $100 to $200. These
filters, such as the Aquifer Filtration System by Kohler,
will reduce more of the particulate and other chemicals
that smaller units cannot achieve. Kohler, being in the
faucet business, also offers models with the filtration
system already incorporated. www.kohler.com
Finally, the most effective water filtration systems
available to homeowners are reverse osmosis filtration
systems. With a combination of carbon filters and membranes,
these systems filter out up to 99 percent of contaminants
from your drinking water. A unit like the GE Smart Water
System can filter out particles that are 100,000 times
smaller than the diameter of a human hair. www.geappliances.com
For more information, or to submit questions about improving
your home, e-mail Lou Manfredini at www.hammerandnail.com.
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