Nov
24
What Are Charcoal Water Filters And What Do They Do?
November 24, 2009 | Leave a Comment
If you’ve been learning a little about water filters because you’re convinced of the benefits of drinking clean purified water you will have come across “charcoal water filters” or “carbon water filters” or “activated carbon water filters”. What are these?
A charcoal water filter is a water filter that uses charcoal for the filter process to remove the impurities. Charcoal is carbon that has been created by heating organic material in the absence of oxygen. The good ones are derived from coconut husks.
Charcoal has various properties, primarily that it is extremely porous and this is what is necessary for successful water filtration. These pores allow water, and contaminants, to pass through and for the contaminants to be absorbed by the carbon by means of chemical attraction, because many carbon based or organic compounds are chemically attracted to carbon.
What then, is activated carbon? Activated carbon is charcoal that has been treated with oxygen in the manufacturing process to result in a much higher percentage of pores. In other words it is more porous than ordinary charcoal. The best charcoal water filters use activated carbon.
In fact it is so porous that it can have anywhere up to 20000 or more square yards of surface area for each ounce of carbon. Now that’s really porous.
And as a carbon filter absorbs the contaminants and holds them in the carbon material they gradually fill up and need to be replaced.
An activated carbon water filter works well filtering a wide range of contaminants, but doesn’t filter all of them, and for this reason the best water filters use a multi stage water filtration process. Not only is the carbon block, or activated carbon filter used but there is a second stage to the process that removes the contaminants that are not removed by activated carbon filtration.
For instance in the best water filters, there is a 2 stage filtration process. The second stage is used to filter those contaminants not removed by the first, like lead. This is achieved by an ion exchange process where the lead ions are replaced by potassium ions. Potassium is a mineral that occurs naturally in water and is not harmful.
And there are two extremely dangerous potential water contaminants, cryptosporidium and giardia, and these must also be removed by the best filters. This is done by use of an extremely fine filtration process.
So although carbon filtration, or what can be known as charcoal or activated carbon water filtration, isn’t 100% successful in removing all contaminants, when used in conjunction with a second stage filtration process targeted at the contaminants not removed by the carbon, it works extremely well. If there is lead in your water, and there is in the water of most Americans, you can expect around 99% of it to be removed.
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