Carbon is a natural filtering substance. It is totally pure and non-chemical. In fact, most of our body is carbon.
You can take carbon pills for toxins in your stomach and carbon, in the form of burnt toast scrapings, has been used as a home remedy for hundreds of years.
Carbon water filters use activated charcoal.
This has a positive electrical charge which attracts and hold more impurities than the non-activated variety.
The reason carbon works so well is that it has a very large internal surface area. Believe it or not, a pound of carbon has a surface area of about 125 acres, and every square inch can absorb toxic chemicals.
In addition, closely-packed carbon filters can remove some heavy metals and such dangerous cysts as cyclosporidium and giardia, which have caused epidemics in some localities.
Acres of cleaning
One of the best things about carbon water filters is their ability to remove a huge variety of petrochemicals, industrial chemicals, chlorine, pesticides, organic contaminants, and various agents the produce foul tastes and odors, or that can even cause disease.
No one even knows how many or what variety of chemicals are released into municipal supplies these days – inadvertently or even criminally. There is simply not enough monitoring to catch them all, and entire communities have been laid low by water contamination.
You simply can’t trust your municipal supply to filter out all these chemicals. They add chlorine to kill germs, but many municipal systems are quite old and otherwise low-tech.
Carbon is the answer
The great thing about carbon is that it is non-specific. You don’t have to know about or test for the ten-thousand exotic chemicals that might be leaching into your water. Carbon water filters, with their vast surface area, absorb nearly everything that is thrown at them.
Other methods of non-specific filtration, such as reverse-osmosis, which force water through a filtering membrane, simply don’t compare. Their membrane is tiny compared to the football fields of surface area in a carbon filter, and they also waste water.
Carbon is also superior to distillation. Distilled water is good for your electric iron or car radiator, but not much else.
Distilled water is sometimes tasteless and flat, and stripped of the essential minerals that all organisms have needed from their water for billions of years.
The carbon filters in a high-tech system such as Aquasana are engineered for the highest surface-area, to absorb impurities, and also the closest-packing, to block micro particulates and cysts.
The real question is simple
Do you want to use a carbon water filter, or do you want to take the chance of drinking municipal water without it?
If you’re interested in learning more about your tap water and the best water filters–click here and read the follow-up article.
Comments on this entry are closed.