There are lots of people worried about our water. And in particular about whether it’s healthy to drink it. If this worried you then you may be interested to find out some more about water filters and water filtration in general.

How does a water filter work and what does it do? Here’s some of the basics about the water filtration process. Things that you should be aware of before you buy a water filter.

The first thing that you need to think about is why you need a water filter. There’s a huge range of different nasties that you can find in our drinking water and different filters filter different things.

There are many many different contaminants. Some can make your water taste bad, like chlorine, and can even cause your skin to dry out from showering. And there are many nasty chemicals found in water in small quantities that are known to cause cancer.

There’s different methods of water filtration that can be used. The first of these is the physical removal of solids, or physical filtration. This is really just a fine filtering or straining of water using a membrane that doesn’t allow particles of a certain size or bigger to pass through.

The reverse osmosis system was originally developed for industrial use in printing and photo processing but because of the need for clean water, systems have been adapted for domestic use. Finding the right reverse osmosis filter system for cleaner water at home is important if you understand that there are more than 2000 toxic chemicals in our drinking water.

Reverse osmosis is a process that makes use of high pressure to force unpurified water through a semi-permeable membrane so that toxic chemicals are removed from the water. The only problem with this system of ‘cleaning’ water is that while toxins are removed, almost all other minerals (even trace minerals) are often also purged from the water, leaving water without any nutritional content.

It is important to understand that the concentration of toxins, water pressure and quality of membrane used to design a filtration system. There are generally two types of membranes used in reverse osmosis – the cellulose triacetate (CTA) membrane and the FTC membrane – each with their own functions. While CTA membranes are organic and more cost effective, they tend to attract bacteria growth and sometimes may generate a smaller volume of water with a lower quality.