It is no secret that the quality of municipal drinking water usually isn't the best. While the various state, federal, and local regulations on water quality do help, they are not always good enough to ensure that your family maintains access to safe drinking water.

The Various Options For Water Treatment

Faucets

The simplest and easiest solution is a water filter that attaches to your kitchen sink. This type of filter will put the water through a filtration medium as it leaves the faucet, dispensing relatively clean water below. Unfortunately, kitchen sink water filters cannot offer the best filtration, due to their design.

Faucet-mounted options must not reduce the flow of the water, or else they could cause a back-up and burst. Because of this, they are limited to a lower level of filtration that doesn't actually remove a lot of contaminants. Many other home filtration systems have this problem, and it all comes down to this: Filtration alone doesn't do very much. It removes most of the solid materials but does nothing to remove dissolved contaminants or those of microscopic size. 

A Whole House Water Filtration System

A whole house setup is preferred because it allows you to treat all of the water coming into your home instead of just one outlet. Also, these types of systems can safely inhibit water flow (to some extent). As a result, they can offer superior filtration and more contaminant removal. However, that still won't be as effective as reverse osmosis filtration. Reverse osmosis, when combined with a carbon filter to remove chlorine, offers maximum purity.

Why Reverse Osmosis?

Reverse Osmosis works in a manner that is very similar to simple filtration. However, there are several aspects that make it more effective.

As proof of its effectiveness, consider the desalinization of saltwater as one example. In some countries, people do not have access to enough freshwater (i.e. desert countries). They will often make up for their water deficits by purifying seawater into freshwater. Before the invention of reverse osmosis, turning seawater into freshwater on a large scale was not a viable option. 

If you look at this report from the CDC (Centers For Disease Control), you can see that reverse osmosis offers highly superior filtration. While all the other listed methods have major problems, reverse osmosis has only one listed drawback (and it's a pretty small one). As you can see from the report, reverse osmosis doesn't literally remove every contaminant known today. However, it does remove the vast majority of them, and that's more than can be said for any other method. Even distillation is not always able to remove contaminants, particularly if their boiling points are similar to that of water. 

What Makes Reverse Osmosis Different?

Those who don't understand the process of reverse osmosis will sometimes comment that it "isn't that different from any regular water filter." This comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of the RO process. Regular water filtration is good for the removal of solids, but it has one major problem: It cannot remove anything with particles smaller than its pore size. Reverse osmosis, on the other hand, doesn't have that limitation. 

A reverse osmosis system works by using pressure to force water through a semi-permeable membrane. By creating a pressure gradient, the system makes it physically impossible for the vast majority of water contaminants to flow through to the other side. While there are a few contaminants that reverse osmosis doesn't remove, these are few and far between. 

Choosing The Right Reverse Osmosis Water System

We can’t give you a complete buying guide in this article without making it a 5,000 word pamphlet, but we can definitely cover the key concepts. For a more in-depth look, you might want to check out this article: Best Reverse Osmosis Systems in 2021: 7 Filter Reviews + Guide

One thing we can definitely recommend is that you check any water filtration system for NSF certifications. This will tell you how many contaminants the model can actually remove and to what percentage.

As we mentioned earlier, most RO systems do not remove chlorine. However, this is not a big deal if you choose a reverse osmosis system featuring a carbon pre-filter (most of them do).

Carbon filters do a good job of removing chlorine, which is quite toxic in its pure form. In fact, pure chlorine gas is considered to be a chemical weapon and is, therefore highly restricted. 

It’s The Best Option

Although it has its own drawbacks, reverse osmosis really is the best water filtration option for you and your family. Drinking water quality affects virtually every aspect of your health, so don't make the mistake of thinking that it doesn't matter.

Given the water situation in Flint, Michigan that still persists to this day, it makes sense why almost everyone in the country should be looking to get an RO water purifier installed in their house.

Like we mentioned above, an RO system isn’t the end-all-be-all of water purification because it doesn’t get rid of chlorine. But you are still keeping yourself safe from a ton of health risks that have long term affects.

For example, before people knew how bad the water quality was in Flint, some of the kids below the age of 10 that were drinking tap water were suffering from permanent neurological damage because of the excessive amount of lead in the water supply. There is no coming back from that…

I agree that not everyone can afford to get an RO system installed in their home, but this should be a conversation that we should be having throughout the country to make sure that even if there is water contamination going on in your city, you are still protecting yourself and your family as best as possible.