Home water filters have become increasingly popular as more and more organizations and businesses condemn bottled, drinking water. There has been a drastic shift from bulk purchases of bottled water to investments in gravity fed home water filter systems because that is what consumers believe is safest for their families, their pets, and themselves.
Unfortunately, these home water filters are not as safe as the assumption that precedes them; the perception and the reality are different.
Particularly, gravity fed water filters have nose-dived into unpopularity for safe water filtration.
Gravity Fed Home Water Filters
As the name suggests, gravity fed water filters rely on the natural force of gravity to draw water through the filtration system. To elaborate, water is fed into a tank and the increases weight allows the water to flow through the filters as the purified water is gathered underneath the filter. These are also known as countertop home water filters.
There are two main types of gravity feed water filter systems:
- internally fed
- externally fed
With the internally fed filter, the system is typically set up on a countertop and is fed manually by removing the lid and filling up the tank. As gravity pushes the water past the filter, you must manually put a jug under the tap in the bottom tank to obtain fresh water.
In the external model, there is already a source of water coming to the homeowner’s property. The top tank is fed with water and the bottom tank retains the purified water that is fed into the home by way of a pump/gravity.
Possible Heavy Metal Exposure
The challenge with gravity fed water filters is that they tend to expose you to heavy metals. In other words, heavy metals are not always filtered out and they can pose great health risks.
What Are Heavy Metals?
Lenntech defines heavy metals as any metallic chemical element that has a relatively high density and is toxic or poisonous at low concentrations.
These may include:
- and lead
While you may look at these named heavy metals and acknowledge that you have consumed some of them in more forms than one, some heavy metals are dangerous at higher concentration.
Most commonly, lead poisoning can be a direct outcome of drinking water contamination.
Further, when small amounts of heavy metals are consumed overtime they can become toxic biologically and breakdown the function of your organs. As a result of this threat, it is essential to remove heavy metals from your drinking water regularly.
A single high concentration of heavy metals can be just as damaging as a gradual increase (bioaccumulation).
The City of Flint Michigan, Detroit and a good portion of the State of Michigan is currently dealing with the effects of lead poisoning because of changes made to their water infrastructure. Even older neighbourhoods of Edmonton still use lead water pipes and receive letters each year from the City asking them to remove and upgrade them.
The ability to filter heavy metals out of water is critical to ones health and gravity fed water filters seem to be failing in that regard.
Home Water Filter Metal Reduction Tests
In order to put into perspective the detriment of gravity fed water filters, consider the following results from home water filters heavy metal reduction lab tests.
Brita Water Filter
Brita water filter is arguably the most popular home filtration system presently on the market.
However when you consider the fact that Brita only removes 14% of lead and 15% of arsenic and increases aluminum by 34% it makes you wonder what all the hype is about. With statistics as such, perhaps Brita should reach the garbage bin faster than your bottled water, right? source
Culligan Water Filter
Culligan water filters, still a common brand, only removed 16% of arsenic, 30% of lead, and 30% cesium and increased aluminum by 52%. source
Pur Water filter
Based on these findings, it is evident that gravity fed water filters are not as safe as they are expected or perceived to be.
The reality is that reverse osmosis water systems yield safer results and should be most favourable. This filtration system uses a semipermeable membrane to remove toxic, poisonous and unhealthy small and larger particles from your drinking water.
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