Article by Pauline Ferguson

Water is vital, more important than food.  Apparently you can die of dehydration much faster than you'll die of starvation.  I know from personal experience that dehydration headaches are intensely painful.

Access to clean water is even more vital.  Bacteria and viruses can live and prosper in water (sounds horrible, doesn't it?) just waiting to be ingested into your system and proliferate.

So should you get a water filter, and if so, what sort should you get?

Should you get a filter?

I'd say yes.  Why?  Because the chemicals and additives put into "town" water to make it safe for us to drink, like chlorine etc, aren't really good for us.  Chlorine, for example, is absolutely brilliant at killing bacteria and viruses.  If it's a choice between cholera and chlorinated water, you know which I'll be choosing...  However, chlorine also dries out the skin, causes irritation, rashes etc and isn't really good for us to be drinking.  A filter can remove the chlorine.  (Which has already killed the cholera... win-win!)

But if you're on tank water (like I currently am) do you need a filter?  After all, there are significantly less nasties in rainwater, right?  Well, sort of.  Rainwater is collected from your roof, right?  What's up there?  Dust, dirt, bird droppings, other animals tracks and results, leaves... all of which washes down into your gutter and sits there.  And some of this stays in the water when it's deposited in the tank.  The big stuff (leaves and sticks) will probably be stopped by your mesh cover, but the little stuff will get through.  A good filter will stop 99% of those things...

Let's not even mention what's in your pipes, and what they're made of.

So what sort of filter should you get?

This depends on a lot of things.  Budget, obviously.  The filters which remove the most pollutants are often the most expensive, but there are options which are very affordable and will work for you.  Your lifestyle is another thing to consider - I'm renting my house, which means I don't want to put an expensive permanent filtration system onto someone else's house.  I also don't want to plumb anything in.  So I use a portable "candle" filter.  It's got two reservoirs - one on the top, where you pour in the tap water, and one on the bottom, which holds the filtered water.  It's got a little tap to get the filtered water out, and in between there's a "candle" style filter which filters out all the yucky stuff.  You do need to change that every so often, when they get clogged up, but they do make an immediate and tasteable difference to your water!

Mine cost me about $30 from my local hardware store, and the filter candles cost about $17 each to replace, so clean, tasty, filtered water is an affordable option for you!

There are different options for different situations, and I'd welcome the opportunity to discuss these with you.  Please comment below on via facebook, or email me with questions!

6 Apr 2012

Article/Information supplied by Pauline Ferguson

Disclaimer - Any general advice given in any article should not be relied upon and should not be taken as a substitute for visiting a qualified medical Doctor.

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