Drinking water treatment was the Number One topic in our family when my wife and I set up home in a mountain village some years ago.
This is our story.
It was easy to decide drinking water contamination was affecting the whole community, and therefore us.
For one thing, when it rained our water turned a bright brown for several days.
We needed to treat it before we could drink it and actually had to let it stand for long periods before we could even wash with it.
For another, the kids in the neighborhood and farmers on the poor hillside pastures dropped excrement into the river where the village water supply came from.
There was no treatment at the intake, any drinking water treatment would have to be done at our taps.
So the question was, what type of drinking water treatment system would be best? It's a question you also can ask, no matter what country or town you are in, because water does not come down any pipe in the world uncontaminated.
Today every water supply that's tapped for any community will carry bacteria, cysts, viruses (at times), chemicals, and organic particles.
In our case we couldn't use a drinking water treatment system powered by electricity, as power supplies were frequently off for hours each day and in the middle of Winter was sometimes not available for days on end.
So our drinking water treatment system had to be passive.
That meant we needed to use a solid, one-piece filter.
Several types were available to us, and they are the ones you'll be able to buy in your town today.
So let me quickly run though our (and your) options for setting up a simple, effective drinking water treatment unit in your home.
The thousands of brands out there almost all perform drinking water treatment the same way: they pass through a porous barrier which stops the contaminants and organisms.
(In our case, on those bright brown days, we had mud stuck to the outside of a porous cylinder and clean water coming out a spout!) There are rudimentary filters which use fibrous material for the porous barrier.
They are often synthetic and they do stop materials suspended in the water.
But if there are contaminants actually dissolved in the water, like mercury and lead, these fiber filters can't stop them.
They are at the low end of drinking water treatment systems.
So a great number of filters use something a lot better: various types of ceramic barriers.
Their tiny pores are too small for many contaminants and if those pores are extremely small these filters will stop even cysts and bacteria.
Again, though, on their own they cannot stop the dissolved materials like chlorine and lead.
For that job there is another group which uses a plain ceramic filter embedded with a special form of carbon -- 'activated' carbon.
This carbon has an enhanced ability to catch many of those microscopic organic and mineral contaminants, so instead of passing easily through the pores in the barrier, they are trapped.
Just how effective these filters are is determined by things like particle and pore size, surface area, surface chemistry, density and hardness.
But overall they are vastly superior to fiber filters.
Manufacturers put activated carbon into their filters either as loose granules or as molded blocks of solid material.
Carbon filters that work with granules of activated carbon let water through quickly and are good for removing any bad tastes in the original water.
But the granules shift around inside the filter, and eventually some water will pass through which has never been in actual physical contact with the active carbon compound.
In other words, you will be drinking unfiltered water with your filtered water.
Solid block activated carbon filters obviously don't have this problem.
Also, their pores are smaller, so they can trap the most microscopic organic contaminants and at the same time allow the healthy, essential minerals like calcium to pass.
They are the safest of the carbon filters and the best home drinking water treatment systems use them.
So there you have it.
If you just need to get rid of particles in your water, the best option is a cheap system using a fiber filter barrier.
However, if you need to remove bacteria and chemicals hunt around for a well-priced, effective, activated carbon filter.
Actually, a good place to begin would be my web site because I've got some more specific information and recommendations.