Are Charcoal Water Filters Any Good?
If you’ve been learning a little about water filters because you’re convinced of the benefits of drinking clean purified water you will have come across “charcoal water filters” or “carbon water filters” or “activated carbon water filters”. What are these?
A charcoal water filter is a water filter that uses charcoal for the filter process to remove the impurities. Charcoal is carbon that has been created by heating organic material in the absence of oxygen. The good ones are derived from coconut husks.
Charcoal has various properties, primarily that it is extremely porous and this is what is necessary for successful water filtration. These pores allow water, and contaminants, to pass through and for the contaminants to be absorbed by the carbon by means of chemical attraction, because many carbon based or organic compounds are chemically attracted to carbon.
What then, is activated carbon? Activated carbon is charcoal that has been treated with oxygen in the manufacturing process to result in a much higher percentage of pores. In other words it is more porous than ordinary charcoal. The best charcoal water filters use activated carbon.
It’s so porous that it can have up to 20000 square yards of surface area for each ounce of carbon, and that’s really porous.
You need to replace the filters occasionally in an AC water filter because the filter gradually clogs up with contaminants as they are absorbed by the carbon.
An AC filter works fine for filtering most contaminants, but not all. And for this reason the best water filters on the market do not rely solely on an activated carbon filter. Those that rely only on AC have some shortcomings.
And in the very best water purifiers available there is no reliance on AC filtering only, because very good it is not sufficient on it’s own. There is a second stage to the filtering process and this stage is used to filter contaminants that the first stage leaves behind, like nasty lead. And the removal of lead is achieved by an ion exchange process replacing lead ions with harmless potassium ions.
And there are two extremely dangerous potential water contaminants, cryptosporidium and giardia, and these must also be removed by the best filters. This is done by use of an extremely fine filtration process.
So that’s the basics of water filtration by charcoal, or carbon. The best water filters use activated carbon as a filter medium, but due to it’s limitations supplement the actions of the carbon filtration with other filtration methods to target the contaminants not removed by the carbon filtration. Like lead. You should expect around 99% of lead to be removed by the best water filters.
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