Water, Water Everywhere. But is it Safe to Drink?

You have seen commercials on television that tell you of tribes in far away and exotic places that don't have clean drinking water that is convenient to the people of that region. We hear constantly that the quality of our tap water is poor. Now the last country in the world that you would think people would not have access to clean drinking water would be the U.S. Of A right? There have been reports of trace amounts of prescription drugs like Viagara, Vicodin, and other drugs. They have also found heavy metals like Mercury and Lead. To date the pollutants and substances commonly found in drinking water are:

Disinfectants

Industrial by-products

Heavy Metals

Microscopic Organisms (live creatures)

Industrial Solvents

Herbicides

Pesticides

Organic chemical compounds (solvents, disinfectants, cleansers both industrial and household)

Pharmaceutical Medications

Recent reports have also said that the fluoride that has been put into our tap water under mandate from the government for the last 50 years to strengthen our teeth, is actually harming the teeth of many children making the teeth brittle and easily permeated or broken. This is because the children and the teeth themselves are getting too much fluoride. Fluoride is good for your teeth, which is why you will find it as an active ingredient in most commercial brands of toothpaste. The U.S. is the only country that fluoridates drinking water. As a result of these findings it has recently been ordered that the amount of fluoridation in our drinking water will be reduced but the fluoridation of all drinking water in the United States will continue unabated.

You want your children to drink more water. Dermatologists recommend that to help keep skin healthy, youthful, and hydrated that you must drink water every day. Water is a healthy, body soluble, hydrating, and calorie free drink. All of those things will not encourage you or your family to drink more water if you cannot be sure that it is safe and healthy to drink. You also don't want to hydrate the body and at the same time destroy the teeth. That is not a trade-off that anyone wants to make! Bottled water is expensive and unless you recycle the plastic bottles they end up in a landfill, which harms the planet.

To filter or buy bottled?

Water filtration pitchers

It would be nice if your kids could just come inside from playing, draw a glass of clean healthy water directly from the tap, and drink it, without you having to worry about what is in it that you cannot see. There are less expensive alternatives to buying bottled water in those handy little bottles. You can purchase a water filtration filter pitcher for between $22.99 and $39.99 depending upon the brand you choose. One filter which costs between $6.33 and $7.99 filters up to 40 gallons of water. This makes your cost per gallon with a Britta, Mavea Elements, or Pur water filtration pitcher between sixteen and twenty cents per gallon.(The ZeroWater pitcher which is the second most expensive national brand on the market sells filter cartridges for $12.50 ea and they filter 22.5 gallons of water before requiring replacement. Your cost per gallon is fifty-six cents per gallon.)

Counter-top or Faucet mounted water filters

The thing about using a pitcher is that the Britta Grande and Mavea Elements only remove three of the contaminants commonly found in water. The Pur pitcher is the leader in the pitcher filtration league with a whopping thirteen different kinds of contaminants which it removes. The ZeroWater water pitcher removes four. That is great until you consider the fact that between the Aquasana AQ-4000, Britta Faucet, Cusinart Countertop, the Pur Faucet, and the 3M Filtrete, a countertop or faucet-mount water filter generally removes between 30(Britta), 31(Pur), 41(Cuisinart), and 46(Aquasana) kinds of contaminants found in water. The 3M Filtrete Faucet-mount filter only removes 3 contaminants.

Under the sink water filters

With the exception of one brand, under the sink water filtration systems are superior to their counter or faucet-mounted contemporaries in terms of purification and the amount of water that they filter before requiring replacement of their filtration cartridges. One thing that is not preferable to a counter top or faucet mounted water filter is that when your filter cartridge is spent there is a dot or a light, or some other indicator to tell you that your cartridge needs replacement. When your filtration system is installed beneath your sink so is the indicator that the filter cartridge needs to be replaced. Also the filter cartridges are much more expensive than those for either the pitchers or the faucet or counter mount systems. Under the sink water filters do however purify your tap water, removing between 13 and 46 contaminants from your water.

Filtering at home and getting it to go

All of the methods mentioned here will make your drinking water cleaner and safer for your family to drink. If you use a water filter at home and you don't also keep water in the fridge bottled conveniently and handy for taking with you, the nice clean filtered water at home is not portable. Think about the limited amount of time that you and your family actually tend to spend at home. If you opt for a home water filtration solution regardless of which brand or method you choose to employ, you should purchase water bottles and fill them with filtered water. You can find portable and reusable water or sports bottles in any dollar or discount store that sells housewares or sports equipment. You can even fill the bottles halfway to two-thirds of the way full with water and freeze them in a standing position. When you get ready to take them with you fill them the rest of the way up with more filtered water and this way your water will stay cold much longer. When it is ice cold and convenient water becomes a much more viable beverage to get your entire family to drink.

For convenience sake?

If you just want the convenience and ease of pre-filled water bottles, that convenience will cost you. Even on sale water usually costs between $3.99 -$5.00 for a package of anywhere from a half dozen large bottles, 12, 16,or 20 small 12 oz bottles. The prepackaged water is easy and convenient. There is no effort required to prepare or package it for convenience. However if you get a water filtration system, whether it is a filtration pitcher from Britta or Pur, a counter top or faucet-mounted filter, or an under the sink filter, it takes only the effort of either lifting the pitcher and pouring the water into a clean bottle or turning on your kitchen tap and filling bottles. Refillable and reusable plastic bottles are also not very expensive and unlike the recurring expense of buying more bottled water when you run out, when you run out of bottled, filtered, tap water, you just go to the tap and refill it and put it back into the refrigerator. It is sad that something like tap water and drinking water has become so complicated. It is also nice that we have come up with affordable and versatile solutions to the issue of clean drinking water.

A side note: Some studies from Rutgers University show that we take in as many if not more chemicals from showering as we do from drinking water.
The information contained within this article is available on the waterfiltercomparisons.com website. See reference below. All claims of functionality and quality are derived from the information submitted by the respective manufacturers of the water filtration solutions named here.

Reference-
2011 authors name not given, Compare Drinking Water Filtration Systems (table), Water Filter Comparisons website http://www.waterfiltercomparisons.com/water_filter_comparison.php