After doing some reading about the negative side-effects of fluoride, chlorine and other heavy metals and chemicals in municipal drinking water, we realized using a Brita wasn’t really cutting it and Catherine decided we needed a real water filter. This was last fall. After using a Brita for a couple years I’d come to a couple conclusions:
- Filling up a pitcher, no matter how big, is annoying, slow and seems to always happen when it’s least convenient.
- Having an extra container in the refrigerator is a waste of space and if the container is big enough, it’s awkward to impossible to fit.
- Room temperature water is lousy.
Several of our friends have Big Berkey systems, but I wasn’t so sure they were as good as everyone said. Based on my feelings from using a Brita, I was hesitant to buy what I saw as a bigger, better Brita replacement. Then I looked at the price of the Big Berkey filters. $300 for the initial system + $100-200/year in filters. Not cheap. On top of all this you’d have to manually refill it, wait for it to filter the water, replace the fluoride filters every three months and clean (with a scotch pad!?!) and replace the main filters on a regular basis. After all this work, you get clean, tepid water (if you didn’t let your filter get too dirty). I was now sure this was not what I wanted.
So I did some more looking. I found many companies that make better filters than Brita and Pūr make, some that solved more or less of my wants. However all of them required maintenance every 3-5 months and I wanted something that gave us clean water, peace of mind and removed a headache from my life.
Finally I found The Water Exchange. It was awesome. Fluoride filters that only needed changed yearly?! Check. Chlorine filters that lasted a whopping 3 years? Check. An inline easy install system that would deliver clean, ground temperature water at a half gallon a minute, on demand and wouldn’t be too difficult to install? Yep.
I sent an email with a couple questions to them and Howard, the stay at home dad and owner of the business, actually called me with answers to my questions in person the same day. He’s a self described water geek and is obsessed with creating easy and high performing solutions. I ended up buying an under counter system (UCD-F) that hooks directly into my cold water line just before the kitchen faucet. A system this good must cost way more than a Big Berkey, right? Nope. Just $189 shipped, with everything you need including filters with a life span that would cost over $250 to match on the Big Berkey side.
I installed this system on new year’s day 2010 [which is a sad story about the despicable state of Lowe’s plumbing section and my house’s prior owner’s incompetence that I won’t relate at this time]. Since then we’ve used it nonstop for almost 11 months and to sum it up, we’ve loved it. The water tastes superior to the stuff that comes out of the faucet and it’s free of heavy metals (including lead), chlorine, fluoride, herbicides, pesticides, industrial chemicals, trihalomethanes, many bacteria and more.
Even better, since we’re coming up on the first maintenance I’ll need to do (replacing the first fluoride filter), I was looking at purchasing a few replacement cartridges. They’re offering free shipping on orders over $99 currently, so I figured I’d get a few fluoride carts and maybe an extra standard KDF filter as well. I sent a question to Howard and got a response back within a few hours that answered my question and gave me a further discount on a larger order of 5 fluoride carts and a KDF. This will set me up for the next 5 years and only cost us about $50/yr. or to be more exact: 1.3¢ per gallon. As a comparison, Berkey filters run 7.1¢/gal with the fluoride filter option (five and a half times more expensive!).
My only regret is that I kind of wish I would have installed a full house system since we do tend to fill up cups in the bathrooms for kids drinks at night, brushing teeth, etc.
