TECHNOLOGY

Water is a basic necessity of life but drinking dirty water can be deadly. Every year 6 million deaths are attributed to waterborne diseases. There are various methods of water treatment but using a water filter is the safest and easiest way to keep your water clean.

There are two classes or types of water filters based on how they filter; Size Exclusion and Absorption.
Size Exclusion uses a "round hole, square peg" method. The most common filtration medium using size exclusion in water filtration is hollow fiber membrane. As a square peg will not fit into a round hole size exclusion prohibits contaminants from passing through the filter by using smaller holes than the size of the contaminates. Imagine trying to push a basketball through a garden hose. The diameter of the hose is too small for the basketball to fit. The pore size or hole size of a filter using size exclusion is large enough to allow water through but small enough to keep contaminants such as E.coli giardia or viruses from entering the filter.

A common medium that uses absorption is Activated Carbon. Absorption works by attracting the chemicals and contaminates at a molecular level and trapping them in the filter medium. Like a strong magnet, filters using absorption attract and hold on to contaminants while allowing clean water to pass through the medium. Using absorptive filter are the only way to remove chemicals bad taste and bad odor from water. The one downside to absorptive filters is that they can fill up. There is only so much a magnet can pick up before it cannot pick up any more. These types of filters need to be replaced more often than filters using size exclusion.