Understanding Water Filtration for a Healthier Lifestyle

A few weeks ago, we started to delve into water and water filtration. Today we’ll dive a little deeper into the subject and further discuss why water filtration is so important to your health and the health of your home as well (pun intended).  

Think about this for a moment, water is the only truly universal solvent. If water has enough time, it will dissolve just about anything. The trouble with water dissolving something, whatever it dissolves becomes part of the water.

The biggest natural troublemakers in the water are all the minerals. Calcium and magnesium are the biggest offenders. In a typical gallon of water there is .0001 pounds of rock, which doesn’t sound like much, right? Now for the fun-with-math part of our program… The average person consumes 75 gallons of water per day, so a family of 4 uses 300 gallons per day, which calculates to 109,500 gallons in a year’s time.

Back to our .0001 pounds of rock per gallon… That’s a whopping 109.5 pounds of rock passing through the plumbing system in the typical family home of four.  Naturally, not all of that rock sticks to the inside of the plumbing system. Going hard right as usual, do you think it’s possible that 1/64” of that rock sticks to the elements inside your water heater? That is the reality of what is going on over a year’s period inside your water heater. That little 1/64” of rock increases the energy consumption of the typical water heater by 10% per year. That means that a 5-year old water heater in a home, with no water treatment system, uses 50% more energy than a home with water treatment. Water treatment saves money!!

The biggest unnatural problem child in your water is chlorine. Chlorine is an essential ingredient in our domestic water supply to kill natural occurring bacteria’s. We would all be very sick if our cities didn’t add chlorine and other ingredients to the water to deliver “safe” water to our homes. Chlorine in and of itself isn’t so bad. The bad part is the disinfection byproducts that occur when chlorine mixes with ammonia and other things in the water. The list of byproducts is a mile long, the worst being trihalomethane, which is a known to increase the risk of certain cancers. Chlorine is also the main culprit in plumbing system failures. The chlorine is the water makes plastics brittle; rubber dissolves and causes general maintenance issues in your homes plumbing system. Health wise, during a ten-minute shower, your body absorbs the same amount of containments as if you drank eight 8oz. glasses of unfiltered water.

As before, please don’t get me started on why bottled water is so unnecessary. Very simply, most bottled waters are water that has been run through a water treatment system. The convenience of bottled water is nice, however, BPA’s in those plastic bottles also pose health risks.

As always, Art Plumbing and Air Conditioning has many solutions and options to make the quality of your water the best that it can be. Call 1-888-TELL-ART or visit www.artplumbingandac.com to schedule your water evaluation today. As a reward for tuning in here, we will include a whole home pleated sediment filter with the purchase of any whole house water treatment system, just mention this blog post. House Whisperer out!!