Charcoal Water Filter. What Are They? What Do They Do?
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.
Charcoal is quite porous and absorbs many compounds in it’s pores and it is this quality that is relied on for successfully filtering the water. That’s why charcoal is used in gas masks, it absorbs things quite easily, both from gases and liquids. The pores are tiny holes made in the charcoal, or carbon, and the contaminants are absorbed into the charcoal. This is achieved by means of chemical attraction, because a wide range of organic compounds are 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.
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 AC filter works fine for filtering most contaminants, but not all. And for this reason the best water filters on the market do not rely solely on an activated carbon filter. Those that rely only on AC have some shortcomings.
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 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.
So that’s the basics of water filtration by charcoal, or carbon. The best water filters use activated carbon as a filter medium, but due to it’s limitations supplement the actions of the carbon filtration with other filtration methods to target the contaminants not removed by the carbon filtration. Like lead. You should expect around 99% of lead to be removed by the best water filters.
I spend time discussing the worlds best water filters on my website.
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