I want to write about water filter topic for quite sometime, but due to my laziness, until today I finally started to write something. I hope I can cover the important info in this blog.
First of all, Bolehland water filter price is way too much expansive if you compare to other country. Secondly, most of the famous water filters like Nesh, Diamond, etc are without any certificate or comply to any recognized standard. By the way, if you are those suppliers, please don't spam my blog; if you agreed with my opinion, then thank you, else, I hope you leave this blog quietly.
Lets talk about standard first. When we want to know until what level a product can performs, we refer to NSF standard. There are many standard published by NSF, but we only concentrate at few related.
NSF 42 is the most basic standard for water filter. It only cover the aesthetic effects of the filtered water, e.g. chlorine removal, taste, appearance, and odour claim. Basically this kind of filter is quite useless if it is installed alone.
NSF 53 talks about health effect of the water filter. It is used to measure how good a filter can filter contaminates that may pose a health risk. So, it is a must for your water filter system to tested or certified to this standard.
NSF 55 is for UV system. UV is used for disinfection, unless you plan to drink the water direct from the pipe, else, just boil the water will do.
NSF 58 is for RO system. RO is one of the most clean water that can be produced using filter. But one of the drawback of RO is that it waste lots of water. Usually if you input 1L of pipe water into RO system, it will only produce around 0.7L of clean water and the balance are wasted. So, if you plan to use RO, please remember to design a storage tank to keep the waste water for other usage like irrigation.
Now you understand the standard, then lets see what we can do.
Lot of people nowadays will install a whole house water filter system in front of their house. I'm not very sure about the price but I believe is somewhere around RM1k or more. If you are a poor engineer like me, then you can follow my way to install you own whole house water filter system.
First, buy one or two water filter housings like the following photo.
I personally recommend two units cause I'm a bit kiasi. Then go to your incoming water pipe, find a suitable place after the flow meter and install the filters. Please remember to use portable water grade of piping like HDPE or stainless steel, remember don't use PVC, it has been banned due to the hazardous of the material.
Once you have installed the filter housings, you need filter. There are lot of filters sold in the supermarket and hardware shop. I had tried 5um filter and it is quite useless and recently I found one of the best water filter sell by Living Depot near my house. The brand is calls GenAir, and it is a 1um filter. The unit is very solid as compare to those other filters, and the price is reasonable, RM3 per unit.
As you can see, the filter is covered with mud. And this filter only been used for 1.5 month.
I cut the filter and found that the inner of the filter is still clean, which mean the filter has done it job to filter out the unwanted substance. I strongly recommend to change filter once a month and please don't wash the filter and reuse, it is useless to install a filter system but you didn't change the filter regularly. This is most of the Bolehland people culture to pay extreme high price for a basic filter system and never change the filter until they change to a new system.
Mud from the filter, don't ask what is that.
Ok, once you have the basic whole house filter system, the next thing you have to do is to get a good water filter system for your drinking water. Panasonic water filters are good choice. The price of the unit and the filter is quite reasonable and you can get from most of the places.
As for myself, currently I'm using a filter system from USA call Instapure, but going to change to a more higher standard product from USA also. Will update you once I got the filter.