Why You Need a Whole House Water Filter

It’s important to drink pure water, but one must not forget about the importance of a whole house water filter and how it greatly protects your long-term health by filtering out heavy metals, contaminants, pesticides, chemical waste, and cancer-causing agents such as chlorine that can soak into your skin in your shower.

We may not want to believe it, but most tap and well water found in the United States is not what you would call “clean”.  Most of it contains levels of contamination that range from moderate to heavy. I’m talking about contamination resulting from toxic byproducts of man-made plants, industrial waste, chemical disinfectants, and even minerals that occur naturally in nature.  Add to all of this the fact that regulations currently in place for monitoring our drinking water only cover a small amount of those contaminants and you quickly realize the necessity to filter the water in your home. (1, 3)

Unwanted Substances

Before it even enters your home, your water may contain all sorts of unwanted substances. It is important to note that whether it is ground water (meaning from public water supplies or wells) or surface water (such as rivers or lakes), the water in your home could be contaminated by such things as:

• Chlorine (many municipal water filtration facilities, if not all, “clean” their water by treating it with chlorine, a known carcinogen)
• Disease-producing pathogens
• Leachate from landfills and septic systems
• Chemicals from hazardous household products
• Agricultural chemicals and runoff from pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides
• Trihalomethanes byproducts (formed when chlorine in treated drinking water combines with naturally occurring organic matter)
• Volatile Organic Chemicals (VOCs), which include solvents, degreasers, gasoline additives, etc.
• Acid rain
• Storm water runoff
• Industrial waste
• Radioactive Elements that result from the decay of uranium in soils and rocks
• Toxic metals such as arsenic, barium, chromium, lead, mercury, etc.

And while the majority of contaminant levels in both surface water and ground water are not necessarily high enough to cause immediate sickness, even small levels of these contaminants can cause serious damage to your health when ingested and/or exposed to the body over long periods of time. (1, 3)

What is a Whole House Filter?

A whole house filter is placed at the point where your water enters your home.  The benefit of a whole house filter is that it helps to filter out the types of contaminants, additives (such as fluoride), and harmful disinfectants found within your water supply before it even comes through your tap that may seriously injure your health.

So do you need a whole-house filter?  Yes, you absolutely do.

Why You Need One

Because we are exposed to more water pollutants than just those we ingest when drinking.   Consider the water we expose to our skin and other parts of our body when bathing, brushing our teeth, washing our hands, doing dishes, cooking, or even swimming.

In 1997, the EPA concluded that the average person could absorb more contaminants from bathing and showering than from drinking polluted water (3). When ingested, meaning through eating or drinking, only about 20-50% of chemicals from the water are actually taken into the body, depending on what and when you have eaten.  But when it comes to dermal (aka, skin) absorption, virtually 100% of the contaminants go directly into the bloodstream. This is not surprising, considering that skin is the largest organ of the body.

And not all body parts are created equal in terms of skin absorption rates. As one unnamed EPA scientist said, “A shower cubicle can be considered an ‘exposure chamber.’ Exposure to volatile contaminants absorbed via the lungs could be about double the same amount from drinking water. In the bath, underarms, scrotal and vaginal areas as well as the groin absorb far greater amounts than in the normal unwashed forearm test.” (3)

In addition to skin absorption and ingestion, we also breathe the fumes of certain pollutants that are released from running water. The EPA has now identified chloroform released from hot, running shower water as a major indoor air pollutant.  So now there’s even a hazard in breathing water in the form of steam, too!

As you can see, it’s no longer enough to have just a filter for your shower head. First of all, no shower head filter currently on the market will remove the broad spectrum of pollutants found that are in today’s tap water. This is because the small size of these filters prohibits sufficient contact time to filter the necessary range of chemicals. But also, a shower head filter doesn’t even begin to cover the water we use to fill a bath, brush our teeth, do dishes (again, where chemical gases are released into kitchen air), wash our clothes, or water the vegetables in our gardens!

See why you need a whole house filter?

The Best Whole House Water Filter I Know

The EPA has identified more than 700 pollutants that occur regularly in drinking water, both from municipal sources and from water taken directly from the earth through wells or springs. At least 22 are known to cause cancer; it is not known exactly how many pollutants are carcinogenic, since not all have been tested.

The good news is that my favorite water filter, the Pure Effect Water Filter/Revitalizer is also available as a whole house filter.

The ULTRA Whole-House Water Filter/Revitalizer is a remarkable whole house water filtration system that works to remove:

• Radioisotopes that get into our water from leaking nuclear plants, Fukushima Fallout, and Uranium/Plutonium mining (this is the only filter I’ve ever seen that removes radioactive particles)
• Drug residues that are not required by law to be removed at water treatment plants (again, this is the only filter I’ve seen to remove drug residues)
• Fluoride using an all-natural alumina-free activated carbon bonded with calcium, shown to be 20% more effective at removing fluoride than the commonly used activated alumina
• Disinfection chemical additives, including both Chloramines and Chlorine
• Disinfection chemical byproducts such as Trihalomethanes (one of which is Chloroform)
• Heavy metals, including Lead, Aluminum, Mercury, Barium, and Iron
• VOC’s (Volatile Organic Compounds) such as benzene, xylene and other solvents that are byproducts of the petroleum industry
• Agricultural contaminants such as pesticides, herbicides and insecticides
• Microbial cysts, including Giardia & Cryptosporidum, which survive disinfection
• Sediment down to the ultra-fine size of 0.5 micron (approximately 50x smaller than a grain of beach sand)

Here are a few photos of the new Pure Effect Whole House Water Filter/Revitalizer.  Scroll down to see the pollutants removed by each cartridge.

You can also buy this whole house filter for well water, which is configured to remove radon, iron, hydrogen sulfide, alpha emitters, herbicides and pesticides, and hydraulic fracking byproducts.

The Manufacturer

I happen to love the fact that that Pure Effect Filters is a small, family-owned, water filtration business based in the USA that never outsources the manufacturing of its products to China.  This is a company that is focused on testing and designing reasonably priced, yet high-quality drinking water filtration/revitalization systems. Their filters are specifically designed to remove toxic substances, while simultaneously leaving essential alkalinizing minerals, electrolytes, and negative electrochemical “charges” (they neutralize positively charged free radicals in toxic tap water) in tact.  It is notable (and helpful!) that they produce both point-of-use and whole-house water filters (2).

As their website states, “[Pure Effect Filters] creates filtration systems that are simple, elegant, and extremely effective at reducing the widest possible range of common contaminants. Our Pure Effect Water Filter Systems protect your drinking water and help restore it back to it’s ‘naturally pure’ state, and by that we do not mean laboratory sterilized H2O stripped of everything but the water molecules, instead, our filters can make the water that enters your body ‘whole’ and ‘nutritious’ again.” (2)

Your Body Needs Clean Water

Water is essential to life. Our bodies are 50-70% water, depending on age, and we cannot live more than three to five days without a replenishment of water because water is constantly evaporating from our bodies.

Unfortunately, what many trust to be “clean” water is actually a cocktail of synthetic and organic contaminants that do not belong there; and due to outdated water quality laws, water treatment plants aren’t required to remove this onslaught of modern day contaminants. As a matter of fact, the disinfection & treatment process itself introduces even more chemicals (chlorine, chloramine, fluoride, anti-corrosives, scale inhibitors and others) into the processed water (2).

As a health expert and as someone who holds a deep passion for helping others lead healthier lives, I am very excited to be able to pass along this product to you.  I hope you will consider purchasing a ULTRA-WH-C (City-Water) Whole-House Water Filter/Revitalizer.

The ULTRA-WH-C (City-Water) Whole-House Water Filter/Revitalizer, along with the Ultra-UC Water Filter/Revitalizer made by Pure Effect Advanced Filtration, will truly go a long way to making your water cleaner and healthier for you and your family.