Water

Water. . . the beverage of choice in the Holland home. Each of our boys get a choice of milk or juice when they wake in the morning, but it's water ONLY the rest of the day. Martin prefers apple juice, Aaron prefers milk, and Jonathan prefers orange juice for his morning beverage.

Rich and I have been trying to figure out what to do about our water situation since we moved to our new place. We couldn't decide whether we should buy a steam distiller, buy already distilled water, or install a water filter of some sort.

Rich finally decided to buy this:

Rich takes over and makes this entry:

This is the "Zerowater" unit we bought from our local Target store. It comes with the pitcher, one filter, and the handy TDS ("total dissolved solids") meter to test the water. The manufacturer advertises that the filter removes all the dissolved solids... so that all you have left is ... water!

First, I tested our tap water. I came up with 186ppm TDS. Lots of yucky stuff. (sorry, no picture proof of that reading)

I then installed the filter in the pitcher, filled it up, and let it go to work. There is an 0-ring that seals the filter into its chamber to prevent unfiltered water from seeping down and mixing with the filtered water. I noticed that there was water dripping past this seal. I knew the filter was not working correctly, but I decided to test the water anyway. I got 27 ppm TDS:

I took the filter out, straightened up the o-ring, and tried the process again. This time, no leaks, and here is what we got: And the water coming out tastes noticably better than the water out of tap!

Just for comparison, I decided to test the water using my MSR miniworks water filter. This is a small hand-held unit designed for outdoor adventures to eliminate the need for packing water:

The filter has a ceramic filter, and is operated by a hand pump. The first time through, I came up with an un-impressive 115ppm TDS.

I figured that some of this might be due to crud build-up in the filter mechanism itself, so decided to keep going. Eventually, I got it down to 96ppm:

So, our new Zerowater filter works as advertised ... and the MSR miniworks (while not as good) dramatically improves water quality.