Blogs from September, 2020

Are you tired of poor-quality water making life at home a frustrating experience? Are you sick of constantly having to re-clean dishes after they emerge from the dishwasher covered in white spots? Fed up with the strange taste of your water supply? You’re not alone. While we’re privileged to enjoy a stable and safe supply of potable through the public plumbing system, the water that you receive may not be quite at the quality you wish it was.

Public water here in California is notorious for a number of issues, including elevated levels of minerals (hard water), chlorine, and a number of other inclusions. In some cases, the effects of these issues are fairly minor, such as limescale buildup or strange tastes. In others, they could lead to excessive corrosion of your water lines or extra wear on your appliances.

However, you don’t have to live with these problems—there are several available technologies that provide solutions to poor water quality. The two most popular are water filtration and water treatment systems. While the two essentially perform similar functions of improving your home water quality, they go about doing so in very different ways. Thus, depending on your situation, one may be better than the other. Here is some helpful advice for choosing the water quality improvement solution that’s perfect for you.

How Water Filtration Works

Water filtration, as the name implies, filters your water using a specialized filtration media. There are tons of different filtration technologies, with many designed to target a specific issue that you might be struggling heavily with. Other types of filters are more universal and will target more water quality issues. Likewise, different filters have different capacities, meaning they can filter different amounts of water at different rates. However, all types of filtration have one thing in common: the filtration media physically removes unwanted substances from your water, thus purifying it.

How Water Treatment Works

Water treatment systems work by neutralizing included substances by adding additional substances to your water that counteract them. For example, many homes that struggle with hard water use salt-based water treatment systems that counteract the minerals. This allows you to adjust a number of different aspects of your water’s chemistry, and even improve the taste of your water or add additional things you do want in your water, such as an increase in calcium for skeletal health. However, water treatment is not a water purifier.

Advantages & Disadvantages

First and foremost, the biggest difference between these two systems is what they do to the inclusions in your water. Filtration systems address inclusions by physically removing them using filtration media. In some cases, this filtration is chemical, while in others a filtration method strains the inclusion out of the water. In any case, the inclusions are no longer in the water when the process is complete and your water is significantly purer.

With treatment systems, you don’t actually remove inclusions from your water, but rather neutralize them by adding in additional substances that chemically react with them. While this can remove strange tastes and some of the effects of conditions like hard water, water treatment systems will not actually purify your water. They can radically improve things like hard water staining and taste, however. And in fact, some water treatment systems can actually make your water even more healthy for you. For example, if your diet is calcium deficient, water treatment can help you increase the amount of calcium you receive from your drinking water, thus giving you stronger bone health.

Finally, there’s the matter of maintenance to discuss. If you’re like most homeowners, you want a water treatment system that’s as low-maintenance as possible. In fact, you’d probably prefer it if you never had to change anything on your water treatment system at all. That’s possible, but only in a very small number of water filtration machines. The most common example is a reverse osmosis system that uses a semi-permeable membrane to act as a filtration media. Because the filtered inclusions are washed away, you may never have to replace the filter for as long as you own that particular system.

With water treatment devices, that simply isn’t an option. For example, salt-based water treatment systems require regular refills of a salt supply. That means you’ll need to buy materials and load your treatment system yourself. Likewise, with salt-based systems, you have an environmental impact to worry about. Because these systems produce wastewater that’s particularly bad for the environment, the state of California has actually outlawed the installation of some of these systems.