Don't Drink the Water

[DonJuane]

Water filtration has long been an interest of mine. Living in Texas most of my life I've suffered through some of the worst tasting water I've experienced in my life and some of the worst clothes staining and cooking pot staining as well. Some things I've learned about what works as far as available filtration methods follow. You see once you boil that water, you get the benefit of all those little microbes roasted, floating tastelessly in whats left of your water brew and what this means is no stomach bugs from your water supply, but the best is yet to come. At this point the good minerals from the water supply of a typical Mexico mining town including arsenic, iron, cadmium, copper, sulfuric acid and more and all of them say to you as you boil, "thanks for the sauna as a prelude to settling once and for all in that fine body of yours". So some of these minerals may actually benefit from boiling water as a catalyst to help break them down to where they will be easier to be absorbed into your body.

I drink GTO water right from the house supply but it's first pumped via a booster pump through a 5 stage reverse osmosis filter system with a follow on ceramic filter. With this setup I probably don't filter everything out of the water, but it's likely as good if not better than what the water companies provide. Shopping for the unit, one can be found online from a US supplier for around $130 (buy the old-style filter canisters or pay many times over and over again by instead purchasing the new Costco "quick change" style filter unit) and also purchase the additional booster pump (required for gravity feed water systems) for around $80 and then add an individual canister ceramic for the final stage for around $50 which all totals to be a one time cost of around $260. A three year's supply of filters can be found for around $110 on US Amazon. If you don't think you will drink $40 worth of water a year in purchased bottles and you don't mind ordering and managing all your drinking and cooking water from bottles and you don't mind staying home every few days waiting for deliveries or else you don't mind toting them up and down the hills here, it might be less expensive to go the bottle route and skip trying to process the water with your own filter. At $40 a year that would be around 20 bottles a year or a little more than a bottle a month. So economies of scale would say buying bottles would be more economical if you drink or cook with 1.5 or less bottles per month. But then who knows what you are getting from the vendors and it's not always easy to manage bottles going in and out and the interruptions to your life that come with the constant shuffling.

Or as another choice (one that I would never select due to the all out potential, and likely one yet, of fraud) you can buy the latest model of a beer-can size "miracle filter" from REI and use it instead. (Using one the size of a tampon permanently mounted in a water pitcher is also popular I have discovered.) Does it work? No one actually knows but you sure feel like it works after paying a high price for it and pinning the glossy brochure next to the sink to marvel each time you take a drink. But who really knows if it is working or not? The lab they claim tested each new year's model never seems to get around to submitting the filter to an actual government approved testing agency and before you press the issue too far, next year's "miracle filter" brand is already on the shelves and everyone has now forgotten about last year's model. Still you have a strong feeling it's doing it's job because the brochure says it is and when you search Google, the entire first page of reviews links are positive, all of those glowing reviews must be accurate since they are from every popular outfitter magazine that got paid to review it. So it's got to be true don't you know ;-)