Are you wondering about the water quality in your Ottawa home? When you do some research, the results are disturbing. Your “clean” tap water may contain chlorine, chloramine, lead, iron, and assorted other minerals and contaminants.
Time to stock up on bottled water? If you want to ensure the water that comes out of your taps is safe, a residential water purification system should be the solution you are looking for. Check out this guide to water purification — how it works and why it will improve your water quality.
When Would You Need Water Purification?
1. When you want the best possible water quality for yourself and your family.
Before it is piped to your home, Ottawa’s drinking water is sampled and tested by the municipality to ensure that it conforms to Health Canada guidelines and Ontario Drinking Water Standards. However, your own in-home water purification system will remove chemicals such as chlorine or chloramine, which have been added to the local water supply.2. When you need to remove lead.
Plumbing service lines in pre-1955 Ottawa homes were frequently made out of lead. Unless you have updated your older plumbing system, lead will leach from the pipes into your tap water. Ingestion of lead, a neurotoxin, is harmful to human health, especially for babies and young children. Boiling your drinking water won’t get the lead out (in fact, that only concentrates it!), but purification will.3. When you’d like to reduce your use of plastic.
Up until now, you may have been purchasing bottled H2O for the sake of your health. All those disposable bottles add up to a big burden on the environment, though. A home water purification system will produce that high quality drinking water you’re after, without the plastic… or the expense.4. When you care about drinking water appearance, odour, and flavour.
Eight glasses of water a day is generally recommended as part of a healthful diet. Some people can down that amount with ease; for others, it’s a struggle. But nobody wants to drink H2O that looks and tastes “off,” or smells like rotten eggs. Purification will remove substances such as iron, for example, so you won’t end up with metallic tasting water (or orange stains in your shower).
How Does Water Purification Work?
Water is a powerful solvent. This means that it is capable of dissolving many other substances. Think instant coffee or powdered paint, for example. Unfortunately, sometimes this effect is actually undesirable, as when water absorbs chemicals, metals, sediments, and other contaminants, dissolving them into microscopic particles. Water purification works to get rid of these contaminants. The simplest method is physical filtration — using a superfine membrane to strain the water, so the clean liquid passes through and the impurities are left behind. The physical filtration process does not involve any chemical additives.What Does Reverse Osmosis Mean?
Reverse osmosis is a type of physical water filtration. Pressure is used to force water through a semipermeable membrane, with openings approximately .0001 of a micron. (By comparison, the average human hair is 75 micron in diameter!) Ninety-nine percent of contaminants, whose molecules are too large to pass through the membrane, are left behind. There are several stages involved in the reverse osmosis process:- Prefiltration. Your reverse osmosis system is connected to the pipes which supply your household drinking water. A high-pressure pump moves “feed water” through several carbon filters, to prefilter it prior to the reverse osmosis treatment.
- Reverse osmosis. At this stage, the feed water is forced through a superfine semipermeable membrane, to catch all contaminants not removed by the prefiltration process.
- Drainage. Contaminants are drained out.
- Storage. The purified water is moved into a small tank to be stored until you need it.
