It’s useful to know how water filters work if you want to buy the best one at the best price.
Otherwise you could buy an ineffective filter at a high price, instead of a great filter at a good price. Caveat Emptor – let the buyer beware.
Passive water filters pass water through filtering material. The most common is a block of carbon, or activated charcoal.
Activation of the charcoal provides a slight negative charge that attracts more impurities.
The quality of activation of the charcoal is thus important. If you get a filter from some third-world country where inspection and qualification is lax, you may have no idea if the charcoal is activated or how well. It’s important to know how water filters work so you can spot the bogus ones.
The reason charcoal filters water so well is that it has a very large internal surface area. If you were to break a block of coal up into smaller pieces, each piece would reveal shiny new surfaces. Break it smaller, and you have even more surfaces.
Crush it micro fine and you have an enormous surface area. A pound of activated charcoal has a surface area of about 125 acres. That’s a lot of poison-absorbing surface. But poorly-activated low-tech charcoal won’t do as good a job.
Anyone who knows how water filters work will tell you that charcoal which is not micro-pulverized, fully-activated, and properly compacted, is inferior.
There are some exotic filters, such as magnetic filters and ceramic filters, but these have not proven particularly effective.
They are not readily available. Given what we have learned about carbon filters above, how is a water filter to work well if it has the small surface area of a ceramic filter?
The best carbon water filters are highly compressed. This enables them to block parasitic spores which have laid waste to entire regions in the Third World, and which sometime sicken communities in the United States.
A cheaply made filter may not be compressed enough, and thus will not block parasitic spores. (A spore is basically an “egg” which develops into a parasite in your body.) Parasitic infections are often extremely hard to get rid of, and you may linger in the body for years.
There are radical treatments, but these can be nearly as harsh on your organism. Now that you know how water filters work, you can read the box before purchasing, to see if you’ve got a good one or a clinker.
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