Why You Should Filter Your Water

A few years ago, I posted some tips for how we save money on groceries. It has been my most popular post to date, with around 70k+ repins. In that post, I mentioned that one of the things we do to save money is to drink tap water. Water is healthier than sugar-laden drinks, and much more frugal.

Filter Drinking Water

Concerns with drinking unfiltered water

Many of you at that time expressed concern over drinking water straight from the tap. I had researched and had some concerns as well. I drink basically nothing but water. My children and family drink about 85% water. We need our water to be clean and healthy.

Unfortunately, the water that comes through our tap isn’t always clean and healthy. Tap water generally contains chlorine, fluoride, and can also contain bacteria, metals such as lead, and a host of other contaminants. (Read more here and here about some of those common contaminants.)

Filter Options

We used a cheap pitcher filter for a while.

Those pitcher filters or faucet filters seemed like a great choice. At around $30 each, they seemed quite affordable. However, these pitcher filters came with some negatives.

  1. They are plastic, which we don’t like to use in our kitchen
  2. They didn’t remove everything I wanted them to.
  3. The pitchers we were using didn’t hold very much water, which meant filling them up quite often.
  4. They were actually much more expensive in the long run.

Yes, you read that last one right. That $20-$30 pitcher filter that seemed inexpensive at the time actually turned out to be a much more expensive choice in the long run.

Berkey Water Filters

berkey main

A couple years ago, I heard about Berkey Water Filters. The Big Berkey that I was looking at costs $258 for the system and includes 2 filters. Compared with $30 for the cheap filter pitchers, and this seemed like a lot of money. However, it was a great example of the fact that sometimes the frugal choice might surprise you. When you do the math, those pitcher filters cost around $.20 per gallon (while not removing everything), whereas the Berkey filters cost less than $.02 per gallon. That is a 90% savings, and it adds up! [see more here about the price comparison between Berkey filters and competitors.]

In fact, Berkey water filters beat our cheap pitcher filters in every single area of concern that I had.

  1. Made of Stainless Steel. Although there are some plastic parts in the filter, the reservoir in the system I have is made of stainless steel.
  2. Large capacity. The 2.1 gallon storage capacity in our Big Berkey is plenty enough to accommodate our family of 4, and is recommended for up to 16 people. In addition to this, our 2 black berkey filters will produce up to 3.5 gallons of filtered water per hour!
  3. Extremely effective. The Berkey system is extremely effective at removing contaminants, while still leaving the beneficial minerals…it’s like magic. Except it’s not really magic, it’s science, and you can read a bit more of those details here. Their filters are actually so powerful that they are technically water purifiers, which means that they adhere to a higher standard than filters.
  4. Economical. Although that initial price tag seemed expensive at first, after researching a bit, I realized that the filters last a long time on a Berkey! The Big Berkey comes with 2 filters, which allows it to filter 6,000 gallons before I need to replace them. For the average family, this means that the filters will last 4-8 years!!!

It is well worth the cost to provide clean, safe, healthy drinking water for your family.

Continue reading here: Do the Hard things

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