If you’ve been learning a little about water filters because you’re convinced of the benefits of drinking clean purified water you will have come across “charcoal water filters” or “carbon water filters” or “activated carbon water filters”. What are these?
Charcoal water filters are filters that use charcoal to remove the contaminants in water during the filtration process. Charcoal is carbon that is created by heating organic matter in the absense of oxygen to high temperature. Commonly coconut husks are used for the organic material.
Charcoal has various properties, primarily that it is extremely porous and this is what is necessary for successful water filtration. These pores allow water, and contaminants, to pass through and for the contaminants to be absorbed by the carbon by means of chemical attraction, because many carbon based or organic compounds are chemically attracted to carbon.
So if that is charcoal, or carbon, filtration, what is activated carbon filtration? Activated carbon, (or AC) filters use a form of carbon that is much more porous than traditional charcoal. This is created during the manufacturing process. The best carbon or charcoal water filters use activated carbon.
In fact it is so porous that it can have anywhere up to 20000 or more square yards of surface area for each ounce of carbon. Now 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.
But there is no reliance on carbon filtering alone in the best water filters, because it is recognized that it is inadequate to rely on AC on it’s own due to it’s inability to remove some contaminants. So there is a second stage that filters out these contaminants by other processes, like using ion exchange to exchange lead ions for harmless potassium ions to remove lead from the water.
And there are some very nasty bugs that are also potentially still in the water after the activated carbon filtration process, the two nastiest being cryptosporidium and giardia. These are removed by 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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