If you’re considering installing a water filtration system for your home, you might wonder what water filters actually remove and how they benefit you. Well, don’t worry—we’re here to tell you!
Here in Australia, our treatment plants do their best to kill dangerous microbes and toxins from the water supply. They do this by adding safe levels of chemical disinfectants like chlorine and chloramine. These chemicals help remove bacteria and waterborne viruses, but they don’t remove all contaminants—and they don’t taste great or bring significant health benefits either.
As a result, plenty of dangerous contaminants enter your home’s water system, creating bad-tasting water, causing nasty irritants, and damaging appliances. Ensuring clean drinking water free from harmful contaminants such as carcinogens, PFAs, nitrate, arsenic, and chemicals from pesticide runoff is crucial for your health.
Let’s look at chlorine and chloramine in more detail, along with the other types of contaminants that home water filter systems and reverse osmosis water filters remove from tap water.
Common Tap Water Chemicals and Contaminants
Chlorine
We’ll start with the big one. Chlorine has been used to sanitise our tap water supplies by water utilities here in Australia for decades. However, we now know that in addition to having a low residual life, chlorine also produces carcinogenic by-products like trihalomethanes (THMs).
There is also a potential link between chlorinated drinking water and an increased risk of bladder cancer. THMs, created by chlorine interacting with organic compounds in tap water, can encourage the production of free radicals, leading to potential damage to the bladder and rectum and subsequently causing bladder and rectal cancer.
Filtered water still retains all the benefits of the chemicals that disinfect water, but saves you from having to put those disinfectants into your body. State-of-the-art systems, like our Complete Home Filtration system, can remove up to 98.5% of chlorine and other chlorine by-products—offering great-tasting, healthier water for you and your family.
Chloramine
In areas where water has to travel for a long period between the treatment plant and your home, local water authorities are opting to use chloramines (chlorine with added ammonia to make it last longer) instead as their primary disinfectant. However, while these chemicals do a better job of actively disinfecting the water supply for longer, they also linger in your tap water, are terrible for local marine life, and are hard to remove without a specialist water filter.
To address this, Complete Home Filtration’s whole-home water filters can be configured with catalytic carbon, a filtration medium with the same world-class results for water quality and blocking common chemicals while also being significantly more effective for removing chloramine. The health effects of disinfection by-products like THMs in public water systems may be a smaller issue than the waterborne pathogens and dangerous contaminants those chemicals are there to neutralise, but it’s still worthwhile to make sure you’re protected from carcinogenic contaminants on all fronts.
Fluoride
Fluoride finds its way into our tap water supplies, both naturally and intentionally, by local drinking water authorities.
Controlled levels of fluoride help to reduce tooth decay, but too much fluoride can have an adverse effect. Some reports label fluoride as industrial waste and suggest too much fluoride intake can cause serious health issues, including neurological problems, high blood pressure and skeletal weakness.
While a whole-home system can remove many contaminants, the most effective way to remove fluoride from your home’s drinking water supply is with a Reverse Osmosis water filters, which can reduce fluoride levels by more than 90% and minimise chances of associated health problems.
PFAs
PFAs are a major issue affecting the whole world. Popularised in the 1950s by Du Pont and manufactured by 3M, per- and Poly-Fluoroalkyl Substances (PFAs) contaminate 95% of the world’s water supplies.
Found in Teflon non-stick pans, Scotch Guard, and Aqueous Film-Forming Foam, these ‘Forever Chemicals’ do not break down and can travel for long distances through water and air. Over time, they build up in people and animals, causing serious health issues—like infertility, thyroid disease, suppressed immune functions, and even breast and bladder cancer—while destroying natural ecosystems. PFAs are also resistant to breakdown in the human body, leading to prolonged exposure and associated health risks.
While Activated Carbon and Reverse Osmosis systems significantly reduce these carcinogenic contaminants, no one has developed a water filter that can reduce PFAs to a healthy, consumable level—until now! Complete Home Filtration is in the final stages of developing and launching a world-first, proprietary filtration system that removes 100% of PFAS compounds from contaminated bore water.
Hard Water
If you live in an area with hard water, your home is more susceptible to limescale, which is caused by calcium molecules. Limescale builds up in pipes, faucets, and appliances like dishwashers, washing machines, kettles, and coffee makers, causing performance loss and breakdowns. Hard water can also cause dry skin and hair while being harsh on clothing and fabrics.
Water softeners that absorb limescale-causing minerals and add salt to your water to condition/soften it are often expensive external units that require an independent power source. At Complete Home Filtration, we’re proud to offer the healthiest and most effective way to prevent limescale built into our award-winning water filter system – no need for individual shower filters or an extreme treatment process to remove beneficial minerals and bring your total dissolved solids to zero.
We use a dedicated ion exchange softening resin to swap calcium and magnesium ions for sodium, cutting down on natural deposits and mineral stains without impacting the alkalinity of your drinking water. Reverse osmosis systems can also be helpful for protecting your glassware from limescale stains altogether, as the water in its storage tank only has trace amounts of minerals – the reverse osmosis process is so thorough, we have to add minerals back in afterwards!
Heavy metals
Hard water also brings another issue: It likely contains heavy metal elements like manganese, lead, arsenic, chromium, and copper. While small amounts of some of these are essential for healthy biochemical function, metals such as lead, chromium, and arsenic can be toxic when ingested. Fortunately, an advanced water filtration system can deliver clean drinking water filtered to 1 micron, reliably removing a range of heavy metals.
Sand, Silt, and Sediment
Water treatment facilities do a pretty good job removing dirt, silt, and sand from your water supply, but some smaller particles still pass through. That’s why we designed our Complete Home Filtration system with three filter stages, removing even the finest sediment particles, dirt, and chemicals from your tap water.
Why Install a Complete Home Filtration System with Reverse Osmosis
Our Complete Home Filtration System is designed to improve your health and well-being while saving money and reducing plastic use.
Once plumbed into your home, all raw tap water passes through four stages of filtration, delivering clean, fresh water to all of your home’s water outlets. As a bonus, you’ll help protect the planet by reducing the number of plastic bottles in landfills while reaping the benefits of having less chlorine in your shower water—offering softer, less dry skin and hair—and reduced calcium build-up on shower screens, fixtures, and appliances to save you money in the long run.
Reverse osmosis systems add an even stronger layer of protection against dangerous contaminants in your drinking water than an activated carbon filter. Reverse osmosis is perfect for anyone who wants complete confidence in the quality of their drinking water. They go further than basic water filters, catching finer particles and dissolved chemicals like hormones, pharmaceuticals, fluoride, and carcinogenic contaminants (e.g. PFAS compounds with cancer causing agents). If you’re concerned about potential health risks and want the best protection filtered water can provide, choose reverse osmosis systems.
Activated carbon filters and reverse osmosis systems are crucial in improving water taste by reducing unpleasant tastes and odours caused by chlorine, minerals, and other naturally occurring contaminants. These filters also effectively remove volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that can give tap water a bad taste and smell. Investing in filtered drinking water ensures access to safe, clean water by eliminating dangerous, harmful contaminants such as carcinogens and PFAs and addressing specific germs like Cryptosporidium, which is especially important for people with weakened immune systems.
