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Treating
water can be broken down into two
general areas: Water purification
(which usually involves some type
of water filtration device) and
Water conditioning (which has to
do with chemical changes in
compounds of the water
itself).
DISTILLATION
In this attempt to imitate
nature, water is evaporated from
one container into another
container. In nature this occurs
constantly, primarily from the
earth (seas, lakes, rivers, etc.)
to the sky. In distillation, this
process usually is accelerated by
heat. There are many types of
distillation units which the
consumer can buy, from simple 2
gallon a day
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units
to whole house applications. The
cost is typically quite a bit
more than the other filtration
devices, but the quality of water
is also better and more
certain.
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DEIONIZATION
Deionization is complicated. The long and
the short of it is that most deionization
units have two different chambers. The
first one removes all positive metallic
ions and replaces them with hydrogen ions.
The second one absorbs the remaining
negative ions and gives off negative
hydroxyl ions. Through the magic of
chemistry, the resulting positive hydrogen
ions and the negative hydroxyl ions form
to produce water molecules. Did you
understand that? Didn't think so. It is a
pretty amazing process but this technology
is complicated and if something goes
wrong, it can produce some pretty
dangerous water because of its use of acid
to purify.
ORGANIC DESTRUCTION
TECHNOLOGIES
In olden times, farmers used to throw
silver coins in water buckets to kill
bacteria and other forms of organic
pollutants. Silver was and is effective in
killing certain types of bacteria. Today
silver is still used to some extent to
kill bacteria (primarily as part of a
filtration device) but we have grown
immensely in our ability to achieve direct
organic destruction with better and lower
cost technologies.
The main organic destruction technologies
today involve chlorinating the water or
ultraviolet light bombardment. These
technologies are low cost and simple to
install and are usually used in addition
to filtration devices which cannot filter
organics.
FILTRATION
The vast majority of purification systems
involve filtration of some sort. All
filtration works on the same principle,
only the sizes of the pores in the filters
are different. The best filtration that is
commercially available is filtration by
Reverse Osmosis. Pore sizes here are .0006
microns. Going to larger filtration pores
you have nano-filtration .006 microns,
ultra-filtration .06 microns, and
micro-filtration .6 microns. After this
you have various other filtration media
which range from 1 micron to 100 commonly
known as sediment filters. For size
comparisons, a human hair is about 100
microns.
Carbon filters are filtration devices
which use carbon to attract undesirables
out of the water and onto the carbon.
A common technique in filtration is
attaching a chemical feeder before the
filtering media to inject chemicals in
water to change the chemical properties of
the undesirables in water so it can be
filtered out by the media.
WATER CONDITIONING
The most popular water conditioners use
salt to exchange sodium ions with calcium
ions in the bicarbonate molecule. The
positives of water conditioners is their
ability to almost completely remove
calcium, the main hardness culprit. The
negatives involve their installation and
the necessity to use salt in the
conditioning process.
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