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If you're tired of shelling out hundreds of dollars a year for bottled water, or if you are looking for a cheap alternative to your not-so-great tap water, you should look into getting a drinking water filter. There are several different kinds of filters for sale today, each with pros and cons. One is certain to work well for your drinking water needs.

The activated carbon drinking water filter, like Pur brand, is the cheapest. A connection that attaches directly to your kitchen sink faucet will cost you around $30, and filter replacements half or less that amount. Activated carbon filters force your tap water through layers of activated carbon; the carbon grabs onto water impurities, retaining them while allowing your purer, better-tasting water to move on through. Cryptosporidium and dangerous bacteria are among the organic contaminants filtered out by these devices, and some inorganic toxins are also removed. Beneficial minerals, like fluoride and calcium, remain in your water, giving it a clean fresh flavor and adding to your health.

A more expensive, but significantly superior, drinking water filter is the reverse osmosis filter. Installed under your counter, these systems originally developed for submarines take up a little space, but provide you with the cleanest possible drinking water without the flat taste of distilled water. They work by passing ordinary tap water through a series of very fine osmotic filters, allowing pure water to drip through while retaining all the impurities on the other side of the filter. While the drinking water reservoir fills slowly, it can provide you with several gallons of bottled-water-quality water every day. The contaminated water on the other side of the filter is washed from the filtration system regularly.

Using a reverse osmosis drinking water filter gives you plenty of bottled-water-quality drinking water for about five cents a gallon in most places, a significant cost savings when you consider what you pay for it at your supermarket. Water that is flushed from the system is still pure enough to spray on your garden and lawn, so if you have gray water storage there is no waste.

Ultraviolet drinking water filter systems are often added at the end of reverse osmosis filters and other types of water filters to eliminate living contaminants like bacteria from your water. These work by shining powerful UV light into your water, killing everything in the water before it reaches your faucet. These are particularly good additions to reverse osmosis water filters; biological contaminants are one of the few things that can get through these filters, and a single plasmodium can contaminate your entire reservoir.

Another type of drinking water filter commonly used is the ceramic filter. This uses something called diatomaceous earth, a natural silicon filter, to capture the contaminants in your water as they pass through in much the same way a carbon filter captures them. The resulting water is on a par with any carbon-filtered water.

If you're looking for the perfect drinking water filter, consider your tastes and budget. If you commonly spend heavily on bottled water at the store, an osmotic drinking water filter can save you hundreds annually and provide better, more consistently pure water. To simply filter a little of the bad-tasting additives from your tap water, ceramic and carbon filters are an excellent choice.

About: Article by Trent Barrett, writer for whole house water purifiers. You can visit their homepage to learn more about home water purification systems

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