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You Must Be Kidding

It sounds tempting. Build a home made water purifier and save yourself a bundle. We hate to burst your bubble, but this is the worst idea we’ve heard in a long time. Here’s why.

Of all the do-it-yourself home appliances and health remedies to surface in the last few years, building a home made water purifier has to be at the top of the list of dumb ideas.

We acknowledge that any manual or home made water purifier treatment system is better than nothing, but this should only be considered if you are forced to treat your own water due to some extended wilderness excursion where you can’t pack enough water for the duration.

Regrettably, for some areas of the world, many of the systems we will discuss here are just not readily available or are prohibitively expensive. We encourage and applaud all efforts to cleanse the world’s water supply and hope some day these artificial purification systems won’t be as necessary as they are today.

Otherwise, unless you are one of the handful of people on this planet that live in a pristine spring water environment AND you have some mechanism to prevent the winds from blowing debris from other areas of the globe down into your little bubbling brook – cobbling together a home made water purifier just shouldn’t be attempted.

Too Pure?

Across a wide spectrum of publicly available research it has been well documented that not only is the process fairly complicated, but even the sophisticated equipment and techniques employed in many of the popular water purifier systems recently on the market are not capable of producing highly contaminant free water without also removing the natural minerals which are essential to promoting good health and the prevention of cancer.

Let’s consider the technology that is involved in purifying a gallon of high quality water for us to drink, cook with or bathe in. If you think you can easily knock off any of these technologies to include in your home made water purifier, send us a note. We have some swamp land we’d like to sell you.

Cost and “Greenness”

For the moment we will set aside the issue of the cost in producing our gallon of water, but just for the moment.

And (from an ecology standpoint) keep in mind that the bottle of water you buy at the grocery store or gas station not only costs more than the gas you’re putting in your car, it annually dumps millions of tons of plastic into the environment so it can seep back into our ground water forcing us to filter out those pollutants as well.

Popular Technologies - That Fall Short!

Distillation and Reverse Osmosis

These early water treatment technologies were developed many years ago to provide water free from minerals for the photo processing and printing industries.

To market these technologies the manufacturers focused their advertising on their products ability to significantly reduce total dissolved solids or TDS. The reasoning was that these solids were harmful and considered contaminants.

The truth is that trace amounts of natural minerals like potassium, calcium and magnesium are found in all fresh water and are essential to good health. To make matters worse, these technologies are not capable of effectively reducing the many harmful synthetic chemicals which are present in our modern day water supply.

Distillation

The failure of distillation is that almost all synthetic chemicals boil before water does and therefore they are vaporized and condensed back into the water upon cooling.

And while distillation does destroy bacteria, and temporarily separates out inorganic compounds, it is not an adequate method for removing organic chemicals as their vaporization point is lower than water’s. These contaminants are simply passed back into the water after the steam condenses.

In addition to all these drawbacks, distilling is a very slow, ineffective and costly process.

Reverse Osmosis

Reverse Osmosis exposes pressurized water to a fine semi-permeable membrane. Most inorganic contaminants are larger in molecular size than water and the membrane rejects these contaminants as well as minerals AND an inordinate percentage of the water. So that water which does make it passed the membrane has inorganic compounds removed, but also the beneficial trace minerals as well.

Similarly to the problem with distillation, with reverse osmosis most synthetic chemicals, including pesticides and herbicides have molecules smaller than water and can’t be removed using this technology.

In addition to these problems, most reverse osmosis systems are only efficient to the tune of less than 1 gallon per hour while wasting 2 to 3 gallons of water in the process. A very inefficient and relatively expensive approach.

Still want to try your hand at your own home made water purifier? Read on…

Carbon Block / Granular Carbon Filters

These are currently the most preferred and common types of point of use systems. The EPA gives activated carbon the nod as the best available technology at removing both VOCs and THMs.

You can learn more about these and other contaminants on our Contaminants page.

Typically installed above or below the sink, these systems eliminate the risk of contaminants entering the water from transfer pipes within the house which hopefully are no longer made of lead, but still may have become corroded over time.

Both of these carbon based systems achieve contaminant removal by having the contaminant bond either chemically or physically to the carbon filter medium. Some of these methodologies employ multi-media filters combining activated carbon with advanced designs that prevent water from channeling around the filter media. When additionally configured with a sub-micron pore structure these systems are also capable of removing cysts like Giardia and Cryptosporidium.

The system from Aquasana pictured here on the left is one of our preferred multi-media filters type systems from the currently available families of activated carbon technologies. You can see a comparison of these systems here on our Home Water Purifier Comparisons page.

Anyone Left?

So, for the stubborn amongst us, if you are still with us and still feel you can whip up a home made water purifier to compete efficiently and cost effectively with any of the technologies reviewed above, be of good cheer! We’re still looking for a few cautious investors for that prime land we mentioned previously.

For the rest of us, we recommend checking out the point-of-use multi-media filter systems from Aquasana. Their activated carbon systems are the safest, most cost effective and easiest to maintain systems on the market today.