If you've read about the problems with drinking contaminated water you might be getting interested in water filtration. You will have heard of charcoal water filters or carbon water filters or even activated carbon water filters. What are these water filters?
Charcoal is a substance created by heating organic matter to high temperature in the absence of oxygen and a charcoal water filter is one that uses charcoal for the filtration process. The organic material commonly used is coconut husks.
There are various properties to carbon, and the one that is important for the purposed of water purification is that it is extremely porous, having huge numbers of tiny holes. This allows the water and it's contaminants to pass through the holes and come into contact with the carbon. The contaminants are chemically attracted to the carbon and so are "absorbed" by it, and don't pass through.
That is what charcoal, or carbon, water filters are. So what are activated carbon, or what is known as AC, filters? These filters use a form of carbon that is way more porous than normal carbon, and this is created during the manufacturing process.
It's so porous in fact that it can have up to 20000 square yards of surface area per ounce of activated carbon. That's really porous.
Because the carbon filter absorbs contaminants it slowly fills up with these contaminants, so needs to be replaced periodically.
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 the second stage of the best water filters removes tiny organisms that remain in the water after stage 1 like giardia and cryptosporidium through the use of an extremely fine filtration process. These are the most dangerous water contaminants.
So that's the basics of water filtration by charcoal, or carbon. The best water filters use activated carbon as a filter medium, but due to it's limitations supplement the actions of the carbon filtration with other filtration methods to target the contaminants not removed by the carbon filtration. Like lead. You should expect around 99% of lead to be removed by the best water filters.
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