Every homeowner desires and deserves the best whole house water filter, with features that offer outstanding purification according to one’s needs. Thus, it becomes vital for a manufacturer to provide the most suitable product in the market to create a better rapport and a moral standing.
Amongst all the manufacturers claiming to deliver the best product, choosing a decent whole house water filter becomes a tedious task. This article will make that task a piece of cake by summarizing the features you should look for when buying a whole house water purification system.
WHAT TO LOOK FOR?
Choosing the best whole house water filter in the market should be a trouble-free task if you know what features to look for. After giving thinking in this regard, and integrating congruent design concepts in Clean Air Pure Water’s Whole House Water Filter, I’ve come up with the chief features to look for:
The Carbon Type
The carbon type should always be the deciding factor since it is responsible for removing the chlorine and its carcinogenic byproducts from the water. Thus, you would want a system that contains the most suitable carbon type according to the water quality your city provides. Some city waters contain chlorine, while others have monochloramine, which affects the use of carbon type.
Urban Defender offers you a choice between granular activated carbon (GAC) for water containing chlorine, and catalytic carbon (CAT) for water containing monochloramine. This is because monochloramine is a combination of chlorine and ammonia that only catalytic carbon can remove. So, if you aren’t using the right carbon type according to your water, you are choosing wrong.
The Body Size
The bodily size of the system highly depends on your house needs. A home with many showers or water outlets will demand a bigger system and more carbon. Thus, it becomes highly essential for you to match the bodily size of the system and the amount of carbon it contains with your water requirements in the home because smaller systems expire soon and demand replacement of either the whole structure or the carbon. Urban Defender, therefore, uses a full 2 cubic feet of carbon.
The Flow Rate
As a consumer, you would always want the highest flow possible in your showers and baths, but the flow rate is something you would like to consider to get the most effective water treatment. The higher the flow rate, the less will be the removal of the contaminants.
Simply put, to achieve maximum removal of contaminants, the water needs to spend time in the media. Sure, an extensive system will help with this, but in most cases, people use about 4-6 gallons (15-23 liters) per minute, which a 2 cubic feet system will provide without any recurring problems.
However, to run multiple showers concurrently, you may want a more extensive system that is provided by the best whole house water filter. Otherwise, you can run multiple units in the chorus.
Use of KDF Media
KDF media is a blend of copper and zinc granules that are highly pure in nature and help remove impurities from the water by redox reactions. You can read more about how KDF works here.
Urban Defender makes use of KDF media in applications where the customer can live with a flow rate that tops out 10 GPM. KDF is my preferred choice of filtering the water because of the unique way it aids in the treatment.
While KDF can do some noteworthy things, I generally don’t claim all of the promised benefits because of the flow rate. This is due to the fact that water running through high flow rates won’t experience most of these benefits. Despite all this, the use of KDF media enhances the effectiveness of Urban Defender in trivial ways.
A System That Backwashes
Backwashing is a process that helps in restructuring the media, thus, exposing the water to fresh carbon surfaces and augmenting the removal of contaminants. Because of this, a system that backwashes becomes a chief factor in deciding the best whole house water purification system.
After a little research in the market, you will find that there are quite a few systems that don’t backwash. As a result, they provide unsatisfying treatment, i.e., more chlorine remains in the water after a few months of use. This often triggers a shorter life of the system because the media tends to expire soon in such a case.
Simply put, a system that doesn’t perform backwashing means a temporary term of the media leading to its expiry way before the expected date of use.
A backwashing system provides you better security by boosting the removal rates and maintaining the maximum life of the media.
Check Out the Certification and What It’s For
You must have heard people recommending buying an NSF certified system. While looking for certification is profitable and a healthy habit, you should keep in mind two questions; what is it certified for? And does your water have that problem or not?
For instance, a certification for taste and odor removal (the most common certification in many systems) means some chlorine has been removed, eliminating the smell and bad taste from the water.
A drawback of obtaining this certification is that your system must be able to remove at least half of the monochloramine. So, at some point during the testing, the removal rate drops from, say, a higher percentage to 50%. This is not right and questions the credibility of NSF certification.
Replacing or Buying a New System
One last thing you must check off your checklist is what happens when your system expires? Should you buy a new one? Or can you replace the media? With Urban Defender, this is not a subject to worry over since it has been constructed so that a typical customer can change the media in one hour.
Thus, you can rest assured with The Urban Defender is the best whole house water filter and built to provide you with a balanced performance at a competitive price.