Are you ready to drink your tap water right from your faucet? You probably never considered that proposition seriously, after having become addicted to bottled water.

In fact however, it would be worthy to consider the alternatives. Unless you live in a lucky location where the drinking water at you tap is constantly of the highest quality, you may possibly find out that its taste is lousy, although the water supply is generally wholesome, for grownups at least.

It is widely known by now that the highest authorities appointed to check water distribution and quality recommend that tap water be filtered at home before use.

Quality home water filtration at the tap offers remarkably better than bottled water at a much lower cost.

When looking for a water filtration system one can compare for performance, looking for the list of contaminants it is certified to remove and to what degree. This information should be provided by respectable manufacturers.

Then one has only to check the total costs, to figure out the cost per unit volume (gallon or liter) of filtered water. By comparing the data from different manufacturers it should not be too difficult to determine which product will best meet your needs.

Of course you will find also other solutions than water filtration. It may be useful to point out here that distillation is not recommended because distilled water lacks some important minerals like salts of calcium, sodium, magnesium and potassium, that the human body needs a continuous supply thereof.

The fact that demineralized water is deprived of essential constituents excludes it from the sources of drinking water that should be taken into account. The same is applicable to reverse osmosis for two main reasons.

The first is that it consumes quite a bit of energy for providing the positive pressure that makes the system work, the second is that it produces a very large quantity of water that did not pass the membrane, and therefore must be disposed of as reject.

Even if it could be asserted that the issue is not settled from a general and theoretic point of view, as specific cases can be found where such solutions would be advantageous, like for the printing and photo processing industries which require mineral free water, the home water purification way to go seems to be filtration, at least for drinking, because even Scientific research points in this direction.

Summing up, multi media block filters as offered by the best manufacturers, have several additional advantages. A blended media extruded or compressed into a solid with a sub-micron pore structure is highly effective to filter out sediment and cysts like Cryptosporidium and Giardia. This configuration also prevents water from tunneling around the filter media.

For best performance it is essential that a multi stage process be used to filter out a wide range of contaminants.