Easy Green Living: Drink filtered water instead of using bottled water

I stopped buying bottled water from the market basically out of laziness: I was tired of hauling those heavy bottles home.  Then as I started to grow a conscience, I realized that bottled water is one of the most ridiculous things to buy when we (who live in the US) have clean, federally regulated tap water already coming to our house.  Bottled water is bad in many ways: 1) wastes plastic for the bottles, most of which ends up in landfills, 2) wastes fuel to transport this relatively heavy material from the bottling location to the store to your house, 3) makes you spend a lot of money for something that is nearly free.

I'm as much of a paranoid parent as anyone else who wants to be sure that my family is drinking clean water.  When we had kids, I went from using a Brita filter (too slow) to an undersink reverse osmosis ("RO") water filtration system.  RO filters are just about the best thing you can get for purifying water as they have a very tight filtering membrane that blocks a lot of stuff.  But over time, I was finding my RO system had a few problems that were bugging me:

1. It throws away about 80% of the water, due to the nature of the way an RO system works, so I was basically throwing away 4 gallons for every 1 gallon that I would actually drink
2. Every once in a while, I would run out of the water from the tank.  This is because RO systems produce the purified water at such a slow rate.  Imagine a fast drip from your faucet, that's about how fast they can make the water.  Then I would be hosed, having to wait around for an hour before I could fill up a couple glasses of water.
3. The instruction manual said that every time I change out the carbon filters (supposed to be every 6 months), I'm supposed to remove the RO membrane and disinfect the entire system by putting chlorine bleach in it and running it through.  That was a big pain to do, and I eventually just stopped doing it because it was so much trouble
4. The tank that holds on the purified water can be a bit big and takes up space, meaning I have less space to put my other things down there.  Not a huge deal, but annoying none the less.

After doing a big kitchen remodel, I did some research to see if I should think about using something else, namely a carbon filter water purification system.  I ended up making the switch, and have been quite happy.  Carbon filters are super easy to maintain.  You simply twist off the 2 filters, and twist on the new ones.  It takes about 1 minute to do the whole thing, and that's it.  No extra sanitation or anything else needed.

How do you determine which water filtration system you need?  Here a couple good websites that help explain the differences and give guidance:
National Science Foundation website
TreeHugger website article

First is to find out where your water comes from and how clean it is based on the water quality report.  To find your city's water quality report, simply try googling it under a term like " water quality report" or similar.  You might find the report under the EPA's water testing database or from Everpure's lab (Everpure is a manufacturer of high end water filtration systems), but not all cities put it in the EPA database and instead host it on their own website.  If you want to be truly detailed, you can send a sample of water straight from your tap to a testing lab and get an independent report.  This will reveal if your particular pipes are contributing to additional contaminants (like lead if you have an older house with iron pipes that used lead solder).  Here's a list of water testing labs recommended by the EPA.  Or you can pick up a simple testing kit from Home Depot that tests lead and bacteria, but a real lab report is what you'll need for a more comprehensive test of more contaminants.  Keep in mind that there are federal regulations on water quality, so all tap water meets a certain minimum safety standard for purity.  

The next thing is to do is to determine whether a carbon filter water system will take out all the bad chemicals that are in your water supply vs. a more expensive but tighter filtering reverse osmosis system.  GE has a pretty popular carbon filter water filter system that is sold at HomeDepot, like this GE Smartwater Carbon Filter System that I have.  You can see the specs on what particular nasty chemicals it takes out from the GE website.  In addition, these systems carry the NSF certification which means it is certified to take out a minimum number of contaminants.  You can confirm that a particular water filter has passed the NSF certification by looking at the NSF website that lists certified systems.  Hopefully, your water is pretty clean and you can get by with a good carbon filter system.  If you have a refrigerator with a water dispenser, the carbon filter in your fridge probably does a pretty good job of taking out the majority of containments.  Personally, I prefer to use the larger undersink filter systems because their filters tend to be more selective, last longer, and get significantly more stuff out than your fridge's filter.

When choosing a particular brand of water filter system, the things I took into consideration were:

1. Price, especially price for replacement filters which you'll be swapping out every 4-6 months
2. Output, namely whether it produces enough for my household's needs
3. How much space it occupies
4. How easy it is to purchase replacement filters (ex. is it an esoteric brand where you can only buy filters from one or two places vs. a well known brand that has dozens of places selling the filters)
5. How easy it is to replace the filters.  Easy ones (like the GE Smartwater system) require no tools, allowing you to swap filters by hand, and make almost no mess of water gushing out when the filters are removed.  Harder ones require a special tool to unscrew the filters and drip a good bit of water out when the old filter is taken off.

There are a couple things ways you can then access your filtered water with a faucet.  Some of the water filter systems include a faucet that you install at your kitchen sink.  You can also have these installed so that they additionally feed your refrigerator's water dispenser as well.

What brands are good?  Well, I've been using GE systems and have been finding them to be fine.  I like that they are so pervasive and GE has been making these things for a while.  The Kenmore ones sold at Sears & OSH seem respectable.  My local appliance store, University Electric in Santa Clara, CA, where I get all my appliances, sells both the GE brand and Everpure as their premium brand.

So stop being a chump paying for bottle water and get a good water filtration system!  It's good for the environment, will save you money, and will save your back!