Purest Water

Water purification systems are available to fit almost any budget. They can be used to filter the water for an entire home, or just for a single cup of water. Water filters are even available for water bottles, allowing people to enjoy clean water no matter where they go. Water filters remove many of the dangerous contaminants in water supplies, providing people with clean and fresh water for both drinking and cooking.

Distillation
Distillation is perhaps the oldest of the water filtration methods and involves several steps. Water is first heated to boiling point, to kill living bacteria or organisms. The water vapour then rises to a condenser where cooling water lowers the temperature and the vapour is condensed back into water, collected and stored.

Distillation can be one of the best ways to get very pure water. It is beneficial since it takes away a wide range of pollutants and most contaminants remain behind in the heated vessel. The main disadvantage of this type of filtration is that there could be other harmful chemicals that vaporise together with the water that is distilled, called carry-overs, and which are ingested assuming the water is purified. Organics such as herbicides and pesticides, as well as ammonia, with boiling points lower than 100°C, cannot be removed efficiently and can actually become concentrated in the product water. Another disadvantage is cost – distillation requires large amounts of energy and water. They are a very slow type of filter, often only able to clean around three litres of water an hour.

Some people do, however, feel that distilled water tastes "flat", as the oxygen has been largely removed by the distilling process.

Distilled water can also be very acidic, having a low pH, and should be contained in glass. Since there is not much left, distilled water is often called "hungry" water. It lacks oxygen and minerals and has a flat taste, which is why it is mostly used in industrial processes.

The fact that distilled water is not like rain water has been shown by Dr. Emoto (who was featured in “What the Bleep do we Know“) using Magnetic Resonance Analysis (see image above). While rain water contains oxygen and minerals and crystallises into snow flakes, distilled water has no crystalline structure and is highly acidic once exposed to air.

"It is not enough to take in a necessary quantity of water inside the body, but we should take the quality of water into consideration. For instance, the district where a lot of long life people live is blessed with high quality from natural resources. In other words, it is becoming common sense that there are a lot of correlations between the health and the quality of water which we drink every day.

Today, even if the water that we drink or use does not contain any detrimental ingredient, the quality of water is not always satisfactory. It is becoming clear that the formation of water crystals reflects the quality of the water. I would be pleased if you would deepen your understanding and interest toward water when you see the photographs that are reported here."
Masaru Emoto, President of I.H.M. General Institute

Dr. Norman Walker, a physician and world leader in natural health methods to heal disease, was a great advocate of distilled water and a living testament of his beliefs – he lived to 109. Dr. Walker considered distilled water to be ideal for anyone undertaking a detoxifying or raw food diet, although other experts disagree, stating that long term consumption of distilled water can eventually result in multiple mineral deficiencies.

Carbon Absorption
This method remains a popular way of water filtration used within the home. Activated carbon contains millions of microscopic pores. These crevices trap microscopic particles away from water.

Water passed through carbon filters gets rid of unpleasant tastes, smells, gases, and many chemicals. It will safely absorb chlorine, sulphide, radon, hydrogen, volatile organic compounds, pesticides and benzene. Occasionally, this method gets rid of micro-organisms. This type of water filtration will not have an effect on hardness of water, heavy metals and solids absorbed in water. The purity of water derived from this process depends on other factors such as type of carbon paper, the design of the filter and the water flow rate. The water collected after this method of filtration can be bettered by using another filtration method afterwards.

One downside to using this method of filtration is that it can result in carbon fines in your water.

Pi Water Filters
Pi water was introduced by Dr. Akihiro Yamashita (Professor at the Agricultural Department, Nagoya University) in 1964. Since then, many studies have been done on Pi water in various fields, and today its usage is widely spread. Pi water is very similar to bodily liquid, characteristic wise, and is created by adding Ferric Ferrous Salt (Fe2Fe3) to water through ceramics. When Fe2Fe3 is added to ordinary tap water, it quickly breaks down the chlorine and suppresses the increase of excessive free radical, and also breaks down the water cluster to much smaller size.

The purified and activated water with smaller clusters possesses a function of protecting cells from various stimulants. That is, Pi water is the water that eliminates negative substances in our body, increases immunity, and possesses self-healing power.

Pi water filters use a combination of carbon filtration, magnetic fields and far infrared energy to create water that is very similar to the water found within the body’s cellular tissue. This makes Pi water highly compatible to the body’s existing homeostasis and this energised, structured water is said to have positive health benefits including antioxidant and immune-boosting properties. Because of the similarity to organic body water, much less energy is required for the conversion, giving the body a chance to work on the overall elimination of waste from all of the cells and tissues of the body.

Reverse Osmosis
Reverse osmosis is a very popular type of water filtration because it is very successful in removing nearly all contaminants of some sort and needs minimal maintenance. As the name suggests, it is the opposite of natural osmosis. This method uses hydraulic pressure on the concentrated solution to act against the osmotic pressure. Purified water is then collected on the lower part of the membrane.

Although this type of filtration produces purified water, water filtered using this method will not have the pleasant tastes that carbon filtered water has.

Reverse osmosis is used to remove about 99% of bacteria and impurities from water. The membranes of the reverse osmosis filters are able to remove almost all of the micro-organisms in the water and will not contain any salts, sugars, ions and molecules that had been dissolved before filtration. Reverse osmosis filtration strategy is a natural process used to isolate two solutions, each with their different concentration levels, from one another. This task is accomplished through the use of semipermeable membranes. This process is so effective that it could also remove nuclear radiation from water.

However, reverse osmosis requires a lot of liquid to be successful. Put very simply, most RO filter units will have a pre-filter that the water goes through first which strains out sediment. From there it goes through a cellophane like membrane that filters out even smaller pollutants. Before it comes out of the special faucet mounted on your sink, the water goes through one last carbon filter that removes any chemicals picked up along the way. It will successfully remove lead, sulphate, sodium, chloride, calcium, magnesium, potassium, manganese, aluminium, nitrate, fluoride, most micro-organisms and organic chemicals. It works great as a whole house filtration system when combined with other filtration technologies.

On a more scientific level, there are several credible research reports and books that stress the more recent opinion that long term consumption of de-mineralised water can in fact be dangerous. Two very negative things happen when we consume water that has been stripped of its natural minerals. First, because demineralised water contains more hydrogen, it is acidic, with a pH below seven (seven being neutral). Every time we consume an acidic substance, our body pulls minerals from our teeth and bones to produce bicarbonate in order to neutralise the acid. Second, it has been proven that when our body fluids become more acidic than alkaline the production of free radicals increases, causing increased cancer risks.

To avoid such problems, some RO units use a specially designed ceramic cartridge, meaning you’ll receive alkaline energised water in every glass, rather than pure ‘empty’ water.

Ionisation / Alkalisation
A water ioniser separates water into alkaline and acid fractions using a process known as electrolysis. When a source of water lacks mineral ions, such as distilled water, or has been filtered by reverse osmosis, minerals must be added to water for electrolysis to occur.

The first thing a water ioniser does to your input tap water is filter it using a combination of bacteriological and particulate control incorporating silver-activated charcoal, the most accepted and proven method on the market. Your water passes through an ultra-fine filter which removes bacteria, inorganic chemicals, lead, organic chemicals, particulate, pesticides, trihalomethanes, volatile organic chemicals, detergents, asbestos, viruses, pollens.

In the second stage, water enters the ionisation chamber. It has a very specific low voltage electric current passed through it, which causes the soluble minerals in it to be attracted to either a positive ‘pole’ or a negative ‘pole’ depending on their electrical energy signature. When this happens, the water separates into alkaline and acid streams. We drink the alkaline water and we use the acid water externally, for skin and hair, healing, plants and disinfecting.

Unlike Reverse Osmosis (RO) and distillation, which remove all minerals and leaving the water dead and acidic, ionised water concentrates health giving alkaline minerals like magnesium and calcium, after removing harmful contaminants. Water from RO and distillation is very acidic (pH 4.5-6.5) and so contributes to the over acidity of our bodies. Alkaline water helps counteract acid / alkaline imbalance. Because RO and Distilled waters are mineral deficient and strongly acidic, there are warnings from a number of physicians not to drink them on a sustained basis.

While RO and distilled waters are strongly oxidising, alkaline ionised water is a proven powerful antioxidant and, having been completely demineralised, RO and distilled water, as well as most bottled water, are understandably flat tasting.

While any one of these methods can achieve a very high level of water purification, one often ignored danger is how the purified water is stored once the purification is completed. Unless purified and filtered water is stored under very hygienic circumstances, purified water easily becomes contaminated once again. The best choice for the storage of water is glass containers.

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