The Importance of Water Filtration

You can’t understate the importance of water filtration. Not only does it help keep your family safe, but it creates clear, tasty, odorless water for drinking, bathing, cooking, and washing. It’s easy to take for granted now, but if you ever have dark, cloudy, or smelly water pouring from your tap, you’ll understand why a residential water filter is a crucial home investment.

Water Filters Protect Your Health

No matter where you are, the water coming out of your faucet probably tastes a bit different from anywhere else. Why? Because every water supply contains different minerals and additives. Some of them occur naturally. Homeowners or municipalities add some of them to water supplies to help prevent problems. The fact is, there’s more than pure H2O coming out of your pipes.

Testing Your Home’s Water Quality

Unfortunately, those little extra elements in the water sometimes make people sick. Public utilities must ensure water supplies meet safety standards. Does that guarantee your water’s quality? Of course not.

The following can skew the results of your home’s water quality testing:

• Poor timing
• Human interference
• Testing the wrong water source

Ask any city worker how they prepare a sample for quality testing. Their answers might surprise you. Cities regularly flush plumbing lines for several minutes before taking a water sample, which pushes sediment and other contaminants out of the supply. This isn’t done when you run water from your tap, so quality can differ greatly from your personal testing and the city’s results.

Old, Rusty Pipes Can Affect Your Water Supply

In addition, sometimes the plumbing inside your house is the biggest culprit. Corrosion of older pipes can introduce dangerous metals into your home’s water supply.

Then there is the issue of homeowners with wells who never get their water tested. If you go without a yearly assessment, you’re taking a gamble with your health. A study conducted in 2010 by the University of Georgia took samples from wells across the state. An alarming 31 percent contained dangerous bacteria and other contamination.

Water that appears clean and clear can contain bacteria or harmful minerals that put people at risk. The only way to detect them is through regular testing. Thankfully, it’s pretty straightforward and affordable to do the job right. Once you know what your water contains, it’s easy to mitigate the problem with the appropriate filtration system.

Professional Grade Filters Provide Clear, Tasty Water

Families intimidated by the cost of a filter sometimes rely on a pitcher filter or bottled water for drinking. Unfortunately, you also bathe, wash, and cook in your water, which can put your family and guests at risk.

Pitcher systems can’t manage certain problems, such as hydrogen sulfide (H2S) concentrations that make water smell like rotten eggs. To remove H2S from the water, a system must convert it to sulfur first, which requires a chemical process. Following that, a filter can easily remove the sulfur, which does more than make your water smell. In high doses, it’s toxic.

You might be wondering why, if you have smelly or cloudy water, your family isn’t sick yet. It might be because the body can build up a resistance to certain contaminants over time. There are some, like per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), that slowly build up in your body tissue. Others aren’t dangerous, just really disgusting to drink or smell. Whatever the case in your situation, you deserve healthy, clean water.

Call Armor Plumbing and speak to one of our experts about the importance of water filtration in your home today.