House Updates: Water Filters

As a lot of you know, we moved a few months back and have been slowly making this house our own. For us that means making this a place we feel completely comfortable and safe in. At minimum, we should feel good about drinking the water that comes out of the tap, right? That’s hard when I know what’s in our city water here. I’ve been employing some temporary fixes while we decide on what route to take to make sure the water is cleaner permanently. I promise this isn’t going to turn into a home improvement blog, but as we tackle some projects, I want to share our journey to a safer, more eco-friendly home and hopefully it will help any of you that are wanting to make some safer choices in your own homes.

So you may be wondering what’s the big deal with tap water. When I first read all of the stats on EWG about what’s actually in tap water, I knew we needed to get a filter ASAP. After a 3 year nation wide study, they found over 316 contaminates in American water sources, as well as many regulation violations happening within the water treatment process. Some commonly found pollutants include things like arsenic, benzene (known carcinogen) and benzene derivatives, industrial byproducts, formaldehyde, asbestos, pharmaceuticals (unprocessed by your body and expelled out in urine, these do not get filtered out) and chloramine. This is coming out of your tap people! You can see EWG’s guide to find out what the most frequent offenders are in your water supply and it can help you know what to look for when choosing a filter.

When I checked our water, it was bad. Like way above the national average of having bad stuff, bad. The worst part is that the EPA has stated that more contaminates are absorbed by our skin when we shower or bathe, than when we drink the water. That means our kids are especially at risk with their lengthy bath times. For our family I want a filter that removes chlorine, chloramine, fluoride, radium, lead, ethylbenzene and more. But finding the right filtration system is easier said than done. Since we’ve moved I’ve been going back and forth about a whole house system vs individual filters. There are pro’s and con’s to each:

A whole house system means worry free water use no matter what. We can get water and ice from the fridge, all the baths/showers have clean water, every tap from our laundry room to our super 80’s wet bar has pure, clean water. The downside is the cost, obviously. It’s expensive and we’d likely need someone to come and install it and make any repairs should that come up. I’m also having trouble finding one that covers all of the contaminates I want filtered out. If we decide to go this route, I’m looking at an Aquasana system shown above.

Individual filters are cheaper and we could install them ourselves, if installation was required. It’s easier to find exactly what I’m looking for in a water filter if we go this route. The downside is that realistically we would have to have one dedicated source of water to drink and cook with. So that means no getting water or ice from the fridge door. I’d have to filter water first, then make ice in ice molds. We are doing something similar now as a temporary measure and it is time intensive to have to keep filtering more water for coffee, drinking water, ice, cooking, etc. Shower and bath filters would be an added necessity to buy and maintain. Plus, there’s not a ton a bath faucet filters. If we decide to go this route, I’ll likely buy a Berkey (which really filters everything out and my friend Janny has raved about forever) and use this and this together as shower head filters. It’s very hard to find a bath faucet filter but I may use this for the kid’s bath, if we go that route. I’m really not 100% happy with that solution though as it doesn’t seem to address chloramines and the filter would need to be replaced often. 

I want to mention what we’re using now while we are deciding on a long term solution. Currently we’re purchasing purified water and using these charcoal filters when we travel. To be clear, these don’t filter all contaminates out, but at least it gives you a little cleaner water to work with. For drinking water we use this activated charcoal stick in a glass pitcher. It lasts up to 4 months and is very easy to use (just refill the water and boil the stick once a month), not to mention cheap. For the kid’s bath, I use these packets of powdered vitamin C, which neutralized chlorine and chloramines. I bathe the kids one after the other, so I use the same bath water unless they’re especially dirty. That way I’m using about 1 packet a day.

I’ll keep you guys posted on what we decide on. In the meantime, I’ll be sharing about paint choices in the near future since we’ve used a ton of it! I have some good before and afters for that too. What other home related products are you guys curious about? xo