Many people are becoming aware of the fact that there are contaminants in our drinking water that we ought not be drinking. If this is you and you’ve been spending some time researching water purification you might have come across charcoal water filters or activated carbon water filters or carbon water filters. But what are they?

Charcoal water filters are filters that use charcoal to remove the contaminants in water during the filtration process. Charcoal is carbon that is created by heating organic matter in the absense of oxygen to high temperature. Commonly coconut husks are used for the organic material.

There are various properties to carbon, and the one that is important for the purposed of water purification is that it is extremely porous, having huge numbers of tiny holes. This allows the water and it’s contaminants to pass through the holes and come into contact with the carbon. The contaminants are chemically attracted to the carbon and so are “absorbed” by it, and don’t pass through.

So if that is charcoal, or carbon, filtration, what is activated carbon filtration? Activated carbon, (or AC) filters use a form of carbon that is much more porous than traditional charcoal. This is created during the manufacturing process. The best carbon or charcoal water filters use activated carbon.

It’s so porous that it can have up to 20000 square yards of surface area for each ounce of carbon, and that’s really porous.

Because the carbon filter absorbs contaminants it slowly fills up with these contaminants, so needs to be replaced periodically.

There is no doubt that an AC filter works extremely well, however any water purification system that relies solely on AC for it’s filtration has some drawbacks. The AC filters some, but not all, contaminants. So the best water filters need to be a multi stage filter utilizing a second filtration process.

But there is no reliance on carbon filtering alone in the best water filters, because it is recognized that it is inadequate to rely on AC on it’s own due to it’s inability to remove some contaminants. So there is a second stage that filters out these contaminants by other processes, like using ion exchange to exchange lead ions for harmless potassium ions to remove lead from the water.

And there are some very nasty bugs that are also potentially still in the water after the activated carbon filtration process, the two nastiest being cryptosporidium and giardia. These are removed by an extremely fine filtration process.

There you have the basics of water filtration by use of carbon, or what is known as charcoal water filters, or activated carbon water filters. The activated carbon is not 100% successful in removing all contaminants, but when used in a 2 stage process designed to remove the contaminants that are left behind by the AC filter, it works exceedingly well. You should expect around 99% of lead to be removed, for example.

Head over to my website if you’re interested in finding out more about the worlds best water purifiers.

Want to know more about the Best Water Filters? Or about Activated Carbon Water Filters? Visit Peter’s Website the Best Drinking Water Filters.

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