Over the years water filters/purifiers have been underrated and overlooked. Water contamination has been a plague in not only locally but also in foreign communities too. In North Africa, Algeria and other third-world countries, millions of people continue to suffer from the lack of access to uncontaminated drinking water. There is still an overwhelming number of people dying from water borne diseases everyday despite many initiatives to combat the problem.

The job of installation soiling does not exclusive live abroad but also in our own backyards. As I pen, there are thousands of Americans out there who are unmindful of the potential harm that contaminated water brings. Even though many people are skeptical about the water filters/purifiers hype there is enough evidence to suggest otherwise. Recently chlorine based water has been linked to diseases such as cancer, birth defects, and other serious illnesses.

People think that our drinking water doesn’t contain harmful micro-organisms and is healthy to drink, but it actual fact it has small concentrations of bacteria that can be potentially deadly at a high enough concentration.

Many people are becoming aware of the fact that there are contaminants in our drinking water that we ought not be drinking. If this is you and you’ve been spending some time researching water purification you might have come across charcoal water filters or activated carbon water filters or carbon water filters. But what are they?

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.