We have many choices for drinking water stations. The issues concerning contaminated drinking water continue to grow, so industry is providing us with more solutions. Just be sure to choose carefully.
What's coming out of your tap? Do you know?
In Philadelphia, there are 56 different drugs, chlorine and trihalomethanes. In DC, there are 6 different drugs, high levels of chlorine and THMs, as well as lead. In any big city or small town, at any time, there could be parasitic cysts. At 800 testing sites around the United States, perchlorate, a VOC, was found.
These are just some of the reasons that drinking water stations are necessary. However, if you don't make the right choice, you could still be consuming contaminated drinking water.
According to Consumer Reports, if your drinking water stations consist of a 5 gallon plastic jug and a dispenser, you are likely to be getting a dose of Bisphenol-A (BPA) with every sip. BPA is a suspected carcinogen. It is known to act like the hormone estrogen.
Consumer Reports tested a large number of the five gallon jugs that are so popular for home delivery. Eight out of 10 leached BPA into the water stored within. If you want to avoid contaminated drinking water, those jugs are definitely not your best choice.
Have you considered drinking water stations that attach to your own faucet? There is a variety to choose from. In price, they range from very affordable to quite expensive. How much you pay is sometimes dependent on what type of contaminated drinking water you must deal with.
For most homes and offices service by a public treatment facility, the contaminants are chlorine, THMs, VOCs, prescription drugs, lead, cysts and other cancer causing chemical compounds. Drinking water stations that address all of these issues are quite affordable. You just need to know what steps to look for.
Carbon granules remove chlorine. Multi-media blocks trap THMs and VOCs, through a process called adsorption. These two steps combined will move all of the contaminants mentioned above, except cysts and lead.
Lead contaminated drinking water can be cleaned using ion exchange. Another choice for this purpose is reverse osmosis.
Unfortunately, reverse osmosis drinking water stations remove all of the natural minerals that may be present in your source. However, they do not remove the chemical contaminants. So what this leaves you with is de-mineralized waters laced with cancer causing chemicals.
Cyst contaminated drinking water can be cleaned using submicron filtration. Cysts are tiny living organisms that cause waterborne illnesses, similar to food poisoning. It is believed that the number of waterborne illnesses is underestimated every year, since the symptoms are often blamed on other types of infection.
Those illnesses can cause death in a person with a dysfunctional immune system. Cysts can also be found in the bottled drinking water stations, if the manufacturer does not use the right purification method.
The best choice, to avoid the risks of contaminated drinking water, is to purchase a multi-stage system with two steps to remove synthetic chemicals and organic compounds, ion exchange to remove lead and submicron filtration to remove cysts.
The cost is less than a dime a day. The five gallon bottle drinking water stations cost at least a dollar a day and you never know what's really in the water.
Your next step? Take the time to carefully look at the water filtration systems that are available. I think you will find as I have, you do not have to get the most expensive system to get all that you need.