Are Charcoal Water Filters Any Good?

By admin | Nov 26, 2009

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?

A charcoal water filter is a water filter that uses charcoal for the filter process to remove the impurities. Charcoal is carbon that has been created by heating organic material in the absence of oxygen. The good ones are derived from 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.

What then, is activated carbon? Activated carbon is charcoal that has been treated with oxygen in the manufacturing process to result in a much higher percentage of pores. In other words it is more porous than ordinary charcoal. The best charcoal water filters use activated carbon.

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.

You need to replace the filters occasionally in an AC water filter because the filter gradually clogs up with contaminants as they are absorbed by the carbon.

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 there are two extremely dangerous potential water contaminants, cryptosporidium and giardia, and these must also be removed by the best filters. This is done by use of an extremely fine filtration process.

There you have the basics of water filtration by use of carbon, or what is known as charcoal water filters, or activated carbon water filters. The activated carbon is not 100% successful in removing all contaminants, but when used in a 2 stage process designed to remove the contaminants that are left behind by the AC filter, it works exceedingly well. You should expect around 99% of lead to be removed, for example.

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