3 Critical Questions to Choosing Your Water

Filter
Thank you for reading this document!

I believe you are concerned about the state of your water and contemplating the use of a
water filter to improve its quality. You have probably read my various blog posts on water
filters at waterqualityinsingapore.blogspot.com. If not, I would like to encourage you to check
it out for lots of useful information on water quality.

In fact, like some of my readers, you may wish to have a coherent process to assess your
situation and make a decision on
1. whether you should get a water filter and
2. if yes, what kind of filter you should get.

This document you are looking at now is in response to my readers’ feedback. I have
attempted to summarise the chunks of information in my blog posts, refine them, add extra
nuggets (NOT chunks) of new material and wrap everything up in a clear and rational decision
flow.

I have organised everything into steps to make the entire process as complete as possible but if
a step does not apply to you, feel free to skip it.

The summary contained here is by no means the one and only truth so please do let me know
if you find gaps and inconsistencies. You may reach me at chen_ko@sp.edu.sg.

Let’s get started!

Start here: I think I need a water filter

I assume that you have a vague sense that something is not quite right with your drinking
water. Or you have heard from your friend’s friend that getting ABC brand of water filter makes
your water healthier for you and your family. Whatever the case, you owe it to yourself to dig
deeper to explore your options and make a decision.

Question 1: What are inside my water?

First, figure out where your water comes from. This should be easy for most of you unless you
have an army of servants serving your every need that you don’t even have to lift a finger to
get drinking water.

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 3 Critical Questions to Choosing Your Water Filter

Your Water Source

1. Rainwater
Pretty clean by itself. Possible contaminants are pollutant gases and stuff on your roof,
gutters and downpipe e.g. lead fumes, bird poop, additives in your roofing material

2. Well water
• Check your local geology for radon, arsenic, fluoride and heavy metal lodes
• What is the land use in your surroundings? Mining, industry, agriculture?
Different activities can contribute different pollutants into your water e.g.
croplands are more likely to leach fertilisers and pesticides underground.
• Include historical land use in your search as events from the past have a habit of
impacting the present.
• Admittedly, other natural and human factors can ameliorate or aggravate the
amount of pollutants in your well water but the above steps will serve as a good
starting point to narrow down your scope.

3. River, lake, stream

• What’s upstream? Mining, industry, agriculture, residences? Ditto here -
different activities can contribute different pollutants into your water.
• Check the land use in your watershed (aka catchment area) i.e. where does the
water flow down from?
• Search through the historical land use in your watershed. A long closed down
lead smelting plant may have left deadly residues of lead in the soil.
• Admittedly, other natural and human factors can ameliorate or aggravate the
amount of pollutants in your water.
i. E.g. climate
ii. E.g. if environmental regulation and enforcement are strong, you may
not even worry despite staying in a heavy industrial area. Personally
though, I prefer not to take my chances.

4. Waterworks
• That’s easy to figure out if the tap in your house seems to disappear to nowhere.
• Tap water comes from a water treatment plant (aka waterworks). But find out
more. How does the treatment work? Does it add chemicals into your water e.g.
chlorine, fluoride?
• What kind of standards does it follow e.g. EPA, WHO guidelines?
• Does it provide a periodic water quality report of the stuff in your water or does
it provide one on demand?

Piping and tanks

I don’t think anyone can run away from piping and water storage tanks regardless of your
water source. Obviously, if you are served by a waterworks, expect to have more extensive
piping and tanks in between the waterworks and your home.

Pollutants of concern include asbestos, lead, copper, rust, microbes, especially if the system is
not well maintained. Cross contamination may occur if the system is inadvertently exposed to

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 3 Critical Questions to Choosing Your Water Filter

the outside environment. Think about a sewage pipe leaking sewage into your partially open
water storage tank… yikes.

Useful information about your pipes and tanks may be harder to come by but I see no harm in
approaching your utilities for any information that they can provide. Other parties e.g. building
management committee may be involved in maintaining these facilities so check with them
too.

Question 2: What do I want to remove from my water? Why?

Hopefully by now, you should have compiled a list of pollutants of concern in your drinking
water based on its water source and the distribution network of piping and tanks. Ultimately,
the “why” of removing a pollutant ties in to a health concern.

Now comes the difficult task of narrowing down your list to those stuff that you REALLY want
to remove. (In case you are wondering, you can’t and shouldn’t remove everything in your
water.)

Do they matter?
1. Does the pollutant give rise to a confirmed health problem? Or at least strongly
suspected of it?
• What is the threshold concentration before a known or suspected health effect
is felt?
• Remember… the concentration of a substance draws the line between making it
a nutrient (or medicine) beneficial to you and a poison causing harm or even
killing you outright.

2. Benchmark standards
• Often, we do not know about the threshold concentration of a pollutant for its
health effect.
• In such cases, we fall back on drinking water quality guidelines such as WHO and
EPA for their list of pollutants. Expectedly, many countries have their own
guidelines. For example, I was once checking through Russian guidelines to
compare them against a Russian built water filter. Feel free to use those
applicable to your own country.
• Just bear in mind that these guidelines are not necessarily based on health
effects. They could very well be set according to detection limits of current
analytical methods, removal limits by current water treatment technology or
simply due to a lack of data.
• Also, note that their guideline values cannot possibly include the vast inventory
of chemicals in the market.
• If your drinking water is for infants, young children, infirm or someone with a
medical condition, you may have to tighten your own standards based on
medical advice.
• Sometimes, psychology plays a part. To me, this is borderline territory but if you
really believe that chemical A in ANY concentration causes health problem X, by

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 3 Critical Questions to Choosing Your Water Filter

all means remove chemical A from your water to make yourself feel better
(psychologically, if not, physically). Your benchmark standard has now become:
ZERO amount of chemical A in your water. Since you can never be sure its
concentration is zero even with the best analytical instrument, I prefer to say
that chemical A should be below detection limit of the standard analytical
method.

3. Concentration
Too often, we overlook one important question - What are the pollutants’ actual
concentrations in water?
• Don’t know? Check your water quality report if you have one. It probably
provides an average value or a range of values or both.
• Answering this question will allow us to make a rational decision on whether the
pollutant of concern really matters!
• Lastly, if you still have no idea of your pollutants’ concentrations, it is time to get
down and dirty to do some testing.

Searching for those elusive pollutants – let’s do some testing!

1. At this point, you should know what pollutants you want to test for. If not, you are
simply wasting your time and money looking for needles in a haystack.

2. You should also know the threshold concentrations for your pollutants. In other words,
your test results should not exceed your threshold concentrations in order to classify
your water as “safe”. These threshold concentrations are based on the benchmark
standards mentioned above.

3. You can take one or both of two routes: self-testing (DIY style) or lab testing, assuming
you don’t own your own lab in which case it becomes DIY lab testing.

4. DIY Testing
• Usually simple and fast
• Usually more convenient since you don’t have to send samples to a lab
• May or may not be cheaper than lab testing
• May not be easy to get hold of the relevant test kit
• Many pollutants cannot be checked with test kits.
• Results are generally less precise

5. Lab Testing
• Make sure you find a properly accredited lab
• You may need to get a clean sample bottle from the lab to hold your water
sample.
• You definitely have to send your sample to the lab as soon as it is collected,
typically on the same day. Unless you are a big spender, the lab does not go
down to collect your samples.
• Some accuracy may be lost through degradation of your samples in transit

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 3 Critical Questions to Choosing Your Water Filter

• Depending on their instrument and your pollutant of interest, the measurement

can go down to ppb (parts per billion) or even ppt (parts per trillion) levels.
• Expect some turnaround time before you get the test results.

6. Whether DIY or Lab, do consider these factors in interpreting your test results
• Limit of detection for your testing method, whether test kit or lab i.e. the lowest
concentration of the pollutant the method is designed for
• If the test result shows “zero”, it may simply mean the pollutant is “not
detected”.
• As mentioned above, would a time lag between sample collection and testing
make a difference to your results? (Ideally, testing is done on-site. If not
possible, at least test your sample on the same day it is collected. But if you send
your sample to lab, who knows how long it will sit on someone’s lab bench
before its turn comes to be tested.)
• Especially for DIY, did you inadvertently contaminate your sample, producing
false positives?

7. Frequency of testing
• Tough decision
• How often should you test your water? Once a week, month or year? (Daily is
probably out for most of us due to logistical and monetary constraints.)
• After your water has shown all clear today, would you be able to capture
tomorrow’s pollution of your tap water by the burst sewage pipe contaminating
your building’s water storage tank?
• How long should you be testing? One year? Five years? Forever?
• Will there be changes in your environmental conditions to prompt you to test
more often? Would you know about such changes?

Question 3: How do I remove them?

If you have religiously worked out the above tasks, you should have a clear idea of the critter(s)
you are facing in your drinking water, specifically
• What they are
• Why you want to remove them
• What are their concentration ranges in your water

Before you head out to get a filter…

If you are looking at removing a microbial threat – parasite, bacteria, virus, perhaps you should
consider good, old boiling. Immensely cheaper than a filter with its replacements, a rolling boil
for a minute should kill off these critters.

Playing with chemicals

You might have considered using a chemical disinfectant (chlorine, iodine, chlorine dioxide
etc.) or chemical coagulant (e.g. PUR). My advice will be NO because you have to calculate and

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 3 Critical Questions to Choosing Your Water Filter

dispense the correct dosage, keep to the correct contact time and deal with possible toxicity
effects. They have their place in certain situations e.g. emergencies & disasters but in general
not recommended for the homeowner on a regular basis.

Finally, the world of filtration…

1. I am using the word “filtration” loosely as some treatment units e.g. UV, distillation are
not strictly filters. But since they have been commonly accepted as “filters” in popular
nomenclature, I will do the same here.

2. Size matters
• In this case, size refers to that of your pollutant. Is it a big bugger like a parasite
or rust silt? Or is it smaller like a virus? Or perhaps magnitudes smaller like a
dissolved ion e.g. chloride?

• If you are getting a physical filter that removes stuff by size, knowing the size of
your pollutant is useful. Physical filters include sediment filters, depth filters,
membrane filters. They typically have a pore size specification e.g. pore size of 1
micron.

• Obviously, your filter’s pore size should be smaller than the size of your
pollutant to effectively remove it.

3. Chemistry matters
• Is your pollutant organic or inorganic? For example, activated carbon is pretty
effective at removing organic compounds e.g. solvent
• Or is your pollutant an inorganic ion such as chloride? Then an ion exchange
filter will be effective.
• Similar, other filter media such as alumina and redox (aka KDF) deal with specific
chemical species.

4. If you have no idea about sizes and chemistry, fret not! General guidelines are available
to tell you how different filters are designed to remove different classes of pollutants.
Some examples:
• Carbon filters are effective against organic compounds and chlorine but not so
well against fluoride.
• Distillation is effective against asbestos fibres, pathogens and many more.

5. Quality of filters
Obviously, different brands/models of filters incorporating the same treatment
technique e.g. activated carbon, can have different performance in removing the same
pollutant. Therefore, check out the manufacturers’ specifications beforehand.

6. Combining filters
In the real world, most commercial filtration units integrate different treatment
techniques. For example, a typical under-sink reverse osmosis (RO) unit is likely to
include a sediment filter and a carbon filter in addition to the RO membrane itself.
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 3 Critical Questions to Choosing Your Water Filter

Similarly, the ATC Super Sterasyl filter element from Doulton can remove microbes,
particulates, metals, organics, chlorine etc. because it has a sub-micron porous ceramic
shell containing a proprietary metal ion reducing medium plus granular and powdered
carbon. This is why many filtration units are advertised to be able to remove a wide
variety of pollutants.

7. Certification
• Though not absolutely necessary, it gives you peace of mind to know that your
filter is certified to remove what it claims.
• The one I recommend is NSF/ANSI certification though others exist. If you want
to remove lead, make sure your filter is NSF/ANSI certified to remove lead and
not another pollutant. The most relevant NSF/ANSI standards are:
i. 42: drinking water treatment units - aesthetic effects
ii. 53: drinking water treatment units - health effects
iii. 58: reverse osmosis (RO) drinking water treatment systems

8. Maintenance and costs

• Filters are commonly specified for their capacity i.e. ability to treat so and so
many gallons of water or months of usage.
• These numbers are based on certain assumptions e.g. quality of your tap water,
flowrate when you turn on your tap, amount of water used per day. Therefore,
keep an open mind in adhering to those numbers when you want to change
your filters. If filtration becomes significantly slower, it is time to clean or change
it.
• Some filtration units come with a monitoring device to check the quality of
treated water and signal a warning when the quality has dropped below a given
threshold. These can really come in handy.
• As for costs, I will leave to it up to you the reader to decide on your own cost-
benefits profile. Is this $1000 unit worth the peace of mind and health that it
provides? Only you yourself can answer.

Final thoughts
1. I hope the above points have been helpful and pointed you in the right frame of mind to
assess your decision on getting a water filter. As I have said in the beginning, there may
be gaps and inconsistencies (hopefully not many!) in my essay. If so, please do let me
(chen_ko@sp.edu.sg) know for future refinement.

2. Now that you are the proud owner of XYZ filtration system from Brand ABC., is it time
to rejoice?

Remember how painstakingly you have collected the concentration profiles of the
pollutants in your water?

If your pollutant concentrations are already low (say ppm or less) in your inflow, your
filter may not be able to reduce them further!

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 3 Critical Questions to Choosing Your Water Filter

Conversely, if your pollutant concentrations are high (definition of high is highly

variable depending on the filter), your filter may not be able to handle them!

In either case, check your filter’s specifications! If not shown, check with its
manufacturer! But especially in the case of low concentrations, the manufacturer may
not have a clue either!

3. If you have done some water testing earlier, now is the time to do another round of
testing on your pollutants of concern – test for the water entering your filter and test
for the treated water. Do your results show an improvement in the water quality? More
importantly, are the concentrations in your treated water below your threshold values?
Hopefully, they are!

4. Stay safe. Bye!

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© 2017 Kwok Chen Ko. All rights reserved.