What’s in your city water? Do you really know? You may be asking yourself if you really need a water filter. If you are satisfied with the taste and smell of your present top water, you might be happy to drink the water right out of the tap. But even if taste and odor are fine, you may wonder what’s in the water you’re drinking. In this case, you want to look at some of the least expensive type of water filtration available; on-tap water filters that attach to your faucet. These are point of use water filters because they are used at the faucet, versus those that are plumbed into the main water line. These on-tap water filters use the very popular Activated Carbon filtration method.

Here’s a brief explanation of three different types of water filtration methods available to a home owner:

1. Activated Carbon; this is and extremely popular and effective type of water filter. This type of filter will remove organic contaminants; organic contaminants include chemicals which are most often responsible for taste or odor problems in your water. What happens when water passes through this filter is that the carbon particles will attract and remove these contaminants, which may include items such as lead, mercury, copper, hydrogen sulfide and chlorine. There’s two types of Activated Carbon filters available today:

a) solid block activated carbon filters contain activated carbon particles that are compressed into dense material which the water has to travel through.

b) granular activated carbon filters contain, as the title suggests, granules of activated carbon which your water has to pass through.

2. A particle filter uses a membrane to screen out particles brita water filter faucet leaks based on their size. The filters are rated according to the number of microns that the pore size is in the membrane. The smaller the micron number, the cleaner filter your water will be. There’s two types of materials that these filters will use:

a) a ceramic filter will be fine to screen out bacteria and parasites and other small particles. However, this filter will not disinfect water.

b) a fiber filter will have larger pores that will stop the dirt but will allow contaminants that are dissolved to pass through.