Home Water Filter Selection Criteria

How do you normally choose your home water filter? Most of us will ask the price first. Then, we will ask the filter cartridge price ? That’s all?

Listed below is the details information that we need to find out before purchasing any drinking water filter system.

1. Certification for safety & hygiene
2. Product style
3. Capacity
4. Flow rate
5. Filter technology
6. Appearance to match kitchen design
7. Space occupation (size)
8. Initial budget and cost to maintain
9. Maintenance time

Are you advised by a doctor to use particular type of water such as reverse osmosis water or alkaline water? If you are not, you have more range of home water filters to choose. Or may be you are looking for a water filter just to remove sediment and undesirable smell and taste only? Or you may need a system that can reduce harmful chemicals and avoid water borne diseases?

According to NSF International, there is no drinking water purifier that protects you against ALL harmful contaminants. So, what you need to do are:

• find out your specific concern on which water contaminants are present in your tap water,
• list down the chemicals that you concern about (e.g. lead, asbestos, etc.),
• check with the supplier of the drinking water filter whether their system is capable to filter the particular chemicals,
• verify the supplier’s claim at NSF website. If you could not find the supplier name listed in the NSF website, you may need to check with the supplier the name of the manufacturer of the water filter system or the filter components.

Do you plan to have a home water filter for drinking only?
Or you may want to use chlorine free water to wash your food materials as well?

If you plan to use for washing food materials, the design of the home water filter (product style) needs to be convenient to you i.e. connected at the sink area, using either separate faucet, faucet mount or sink faucet.

In addition to that, you may need bigger capacity home water purifier if use for cooking. Calculate your filtered water consumption for a year. Then choose the water filter capacity that is closer to your yearly consumption.

As you need to follow the manufacturer instruction in frequency of cartridge changing, there is no need to buy a unit which has much bigger capacity than you need.

You may need to consider this criteria if you are looking for a water purification system for your cooking preparation. Check with the supplier on the flow rate of the system. Or you can check it at NSF website. Generally, you need at least 0.5 US gallon per minute (1.9 litre/min). However the actual flow rate is depend on your house incoming water pressure.

Understand some basic filter technology of water purification system may be helpful for you to choose a water purifier. Choose the technology that does not give secret failure.

You may have spent thousand of dollars to renovate your kitchen and have beautiful designed kitchen cabinet. Of course you do not want a water purifier sitting on the counter with the tubing hanging around and ‘spoil’ the look of your kitchen.

Then you may want to consider an under sink water filter. Alternatively you may want to hang your counter top water filter on the kitchen wall if the product is looking good with your kitchen design. This will make the kitchen countertop cleaning much easier.

You may have spent thousand of dollars to renovate your kitchen and have beautiful designed kitchen cabinet. Of course you do not want a water purifier sitting on the counter with the tubing hanging around and ‘spoil’ the look of your kitchen.

Then you may want to consider an under sink water filter. Alternatively you may want to hang your counter top water filter on the kitchen wall if the product is looking good with your kitchen design. This will make the kitchen countertop cleaning much easier.

Checking the price of a water filtration system is much easier than checking on the maintenance costs. Provide your budget in a range. You may want to increase your budget if you wish to have additional safe guard on certain harmful contaminants. Or you may want to reduce the budget if you feel it is unnecessary to filter some particular chemicals as the chances for it to presence is very small.

The more chemicals a home water purifier can filter, normally the more expensive it will be. However, beware of any performance claims by supplier or manufacturer. Look for certified performance claim in the product’s ‘Performance Data Sheet’.

Different product style is different in price too:

Cost to maintain a home water filter system may include the following:

• cost of total water filter cartridges versus the cartridge capacity
• any electricity cost
• any wastage cost
• cost of the parts in the system which is subjected to ‘wear and tear’ (parts that will spoil someday somehow)
• any technician cost for cartridge changing
• any technician cost for repairing the ‘wear and tear’ parts
• any delivery cost for cartridge or ‘parts’
• does it require much of your time and ‘petrol’ to reach the place where you get the replacement

The list above is just something for you to estimate the overall cost. To calculate the individual cost may not easy and is time consuming.

You may wonder what maintenance time is.
The time when you are unable to use the system is called maintenance time.

• Is there any possibility for the water filtration system to break down?
• If yes, how long does it require to get repaired?
• Is there any possibility for an urgent cartridge replacement?
• If yes, how long does it require to get replaced?

You can use this checklist as a guide for you to buy a water filter.