Choosing the best among the water purifiers for home has now become difficult, also due to widespread misinformation that is rampant in order to push you to buy the more expensive model or to make you retrace your steps and consume bottled water. There are many opposing interests, on the one hand those of the manufacturers, sellers and installers of purification plants and, on the other, those of the suppliers of bottled water. The latter are trying to regain market share or stop a hemorrhage of profits, which collapsed with the spread of this method of refining tap water.
UK has been a large consumer of bottled water for too long, so much so that it deserves the first place in Europe, but this sad record is about to be interrupted thanks to the awareness that tap water is 1,000 to 3,000 times cheaper and often even better than the marketed one. In a domestic economy, the consumption of packaged water greatly affects whether we are forced to use it also to boil pasta or wash fruit. By using water purifiers for home we can save a considerable amount of money.
The first piece of advice we give you is to never let someone into the house with the excuse of analyzing your water, even if for free, it is the typical Trojan horse that is used to place a very expensive system that you could buy for a lot of money. lower and with no monthly maintenance fees. If you really want to test your water and understand if you really need a purification system, you can buy a domestic water analyzer for a few euros. Later we will explain what to do before buying a purification system and we will recommend the best water purifiers for home.
How to analyze tap water:
Before drinking your tap water, you must be sure that it does not contain dissolved elements that are dangerous to your health, a healthy drink does not always flow out and this depends on many factors. The aqueduct that provides the water service must, by law, periodically analyze the water and issue consumers with a certificate of potability. Most of the time this is the case, but it would be better to make sure by consulting the website of your municipality or that of the water company that provides the service.
Even in the presence of this certification, the water is not necessarily good to drink, because on the way to your home it passes through many pipes and is deposited in the domestic and condominium tank. Along the way, it could become excessively loaded with metals, algae, minerals and sediments that should not be ingested.
Even chlorination, if on the one hand it eliminates algae, viruses and bacteria, on the other hand it gives an unpleasant taste and smell. Even after letting the chlorine evaporate, its residues (trihalomethanes) remain dissolved and cause an annoying aftertaste. Another thing that cannot be eliminated without good filtration and the presence of excess sodium and calcium that give your water a bad taste and damage appliances.
So, if your water is drinkable, you can proceed to the following tests:
- Observe your water against the light to see if it is crystal clear.
- Smell it to find out how much chlorine is still dissolved.
- Analyze the filters on your faucet (aerators) to check for sediment.
- Pour the water onto a white cloth with very dense fibers. If it becomes black, it means that the water is sedimentary.
- Buy a tester to analyze tap water, it will help you understand if the water is good to drink.
Finally, you could taste the water to see if the flavor is suitable for your palate. It is not enough to know that the water is drinkable, it must also be pleasant to drink a nice glass of water without feeling disgusted.
Water purifiers for the home, which ones to choose?
If one of these tests fails, then you will need a domestic water purifier and the choice will depend on the information you have obtained from the tests performed previously. In particular, you will have to pay attention to the hardness of the water which indicates the amount of calcium and magnesium ions dissolved in it and take action to bring them to an acceptable level.
In UK water hardness is generally expressed in degrees (° f or ° fH) where one degree represents 10 mg of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) per liter of water and this value should be approximately 10 ° f.
The reverse osmosis purifier is not the only filtration system capable of reducing water hardness, even a good filtration system with ion exchange resins is capable of eliminating excessive amounts of calcium and magnesium from the water, restoring sweetness and taste. . Reverse osmosis has such a filtering power (hyper filtration) that it eliminates almost all the dissolved minerals up to bringing the hardness value to about 0.1 ° f and, therefore, the water would be too sweet because it lacks calcium, sodium and magnesium.
In fact, the best reverse osmosis water purifiers for home are equipped with a re-mineralizer that restores the amount of salts that have been eliminated during the osmotic process. The presence of this mineralizer is essential to regulate and set the ideal taste that will not make you regret the expensive bottled waters.
When choosing a home water purifier you must consider, not only the filtering power, but also the price and with a third of the expense you could achieve the desired result. Furthermore, the installation and maintenance costs of an osmosis purifier are higher than those of a micro filtration system.
If you are still undecided about the type of system to buy, consult our “water purifier, how it works and which one to choose” guide.
