I thought I would share my experience regarding how I now get drinking water with you all. It's been an interesting education since my move. I'm also curious as to how you get your drinking water. My sad, but educational, story is below.
Before the move to the farm, I was on city water and just mixed things up between bottled water (i.e. cases of Costco liter bottles) and using the tap with a PUR filter on the faucet. The city water was clean other than TDS around 400. The PUR knocked it down to around 250 or so, though it required monthly filter changes. Before that, for a few years I would just take three gallon bottles to the water machine at the grocery store, but that got to be a drag so I switched to the above method.
After I moved and was on well water, I had to make some changes. The house well here is at 170 feet. After the well was drilled around 40 years ago, the water tested very clean, and I remember as a kid that it was also pretty soft. After I moved back up here, I ran a test with a well water home kit. TDS in the 500's, and it popped for nitrates. The home kits don't give you high resolution, but I was guessing around 40ppm from the nitrate strip color (EPA limit is 10). It also very barely looked like it popped for pesticides, though within EPA limits. Since it popped for nitrates, I figured I'd better spring for the couple hundred bucks for a full lab test. Up until the lab test, for safety, I went back to my old hated method of filling bottles at the water machine.
The test actually came back better than expected, with no detectable pesticides and almost everything else they test for as "not detectable", including the bad metals. Though they did get 30ppm for nitrates, and their TDS was 600, with hardness at 430. pH was actually good at 7.4.
So given those parameters, I started researching filtering methods that would get me good drinking water without having to drag the damn water bottles into town every week. Filters like the PUR were right out because of the nitrates, and further research indicated the nitrates were my one major limitation regarding what I could use. So here are all the things I tested:
Zero water filter:
I thought this might be my ticket because it was a portable pitcher, and not only almost completely removed TDS, but it also had an ion exchange filter, which is one of the only ways to remove nitrates. It also looked to be an inexpensive solution. I tested the filtered water with another home kit, and lo and behold, TDS=2, and nitrates were barely detectable (like maybe 1-2ppm). I thought I'd completed my mission on the first try. The problem was, after around six pitchers, because of the high TDS of the input water, and limited life of the ion exchange element, the filter was done. Filters cost ten bucks a pop, so this was a fail, especially from the "inexpensive" side.
Berkey and British Berkefeld water filters:
I got a lot of hits on these filters while researching. While the British Berkefeld filters are ceramic and have been used globally for a long time, they sadly do not remove nitrates. The American "black Berkey" filters claim to remove nitrates at 18mg/L, but they are not government certified. So for experimentation, more money out the door, and I bought a 'Big Berkey" housing with two Berkefeld ceramic filters and two black Berkey filters. As expected, the ceramic filters did not remove nitrates to any detectable level. They also did not reduce TDS to any great degree (which they state in their data). Running bottled water through them, they actually slightly increased TDS, but the water tasted much better.
The black Berkey filters actually did remove some nitrates, but the home test kit indicated only to 20ppm or so. If my home test strips are off as compared to the professional lab results above, perhaps they remove them to a greater degree. Also, for adults, 20ppm nitrates, from my research, is not necessarily bad. It equates to 20mg/L, and I probably ingest more nitrates via bacon sausage, etc. than from the couple of liters of water I drink a day if I were to use the black Berkeys. However TDS was still high, and also with using the water for cooking, if water boils, it further concentrates nitrates, so theoretically it could pop them back up higher for cooking water. So while I might live with the black Berkeys for drinking water, for general use I wanted to be safer. Side note, because I was now concerned about my dog drinking straight from the well, I setup a redneck water cooler for her with two five gallon buckets and a single black Berkey to reduce the nitrates she takes in.
Reverse Osmosis:
The most expensive solution, but the one I ended up using. RO of course takes care of pretty much everything. Because I don't have under sink room for a holding tank, I went for an APEC countertop unit that I setup at a lightly used sink in a "kitchenette" in the house. The countertop unit attaches to the faucet, so it can get in the way of a faucet that's used a lot. No nitrates detected, and TDS at around 30ppm, which is in the normal range given the high TDS of the input water. One potential downside to RO water, depending on who you listen to, is that pure RO water can leach minerals from the body through osmosis. I don't know that it's a serious issue, but what I do, since I have the Berkey housing, is fill my three gallon bottles that I used to take to the store with RO water (takes about 50 minutes per bottle) and then pour that water into the Berkey housing with the ceramic Berkefeld filters, which actually add a little TDS, and again, for some reason, I like the taste of the water after it comes through the ceramic filters.
So that is my current setup for drinking and cooking water. Again, if it weren't for the nitrate pop and higher TDS, I could have been good with just the Big Berkey. In fact if the groundwater continues to lower here (which I believe is a direct input to the degraded water quality of the house well over the years), I might be able to eliminate RO if I drill a new house well. The new ag well I had to put in last year is at 400 feet. I didn't do a lab test on it as of yet, but home testing puts the TDS at ~240, and no nitrates show up on a home test strip, which makes me think it would pass a professional lab test as well. If a new house well is drilled to that depth, it's in the same part of the aquifer, so I would expect the water to come out just as pure.
So that's my drinking water story. Maybe it will be useful information to some of you. Even if not for general home drinking water, one aspect that might be useful from the emergency preparedness front is the new (to me) knowledge regarding filtering nitrates. I know we've talked a lot about emergency water filtration, etc. but given the knowledge that nitrates can only be reliably removed via RO, ion exchange, or distillation, it sheds new light on what otherwise well known and quality filters, like Sawyers, Katadyns, etc. can and can't do for you in a survival situation. In fact writing this reminds me that an experiment I haven't done is to run the well water through my backpacking / emergency filters. I have Sawyers, a Katadyn, an MSR, and a couple of Frontier straws. I'll set some time aside and run the water through each of those filters and post the results for TDS and nitrates. I'd test for more, but the good home test kits are 25 bucks a pop. :)
