Have you ever wondered? What’s in the minor pitcher that makes your water tastes better? Have you ever wondered what’s in your shower filter to make the water feel better and smell better? Have you ever wondered what’s in the filter under the kitchen sink that gives that water, that wonderful clean taste?
Well, it’s probably carbon. Carbon is the stuff that’s been around a long, long time that makes your water tastes perfect back in ancient Egyptian times. They figured out that carbon made the water tastes better. So there are places in the history books that talk about how they used it.
Well, today, we use carbon in a variety of spaces, not just for water. It’s used to clean up the air. They put in your insoles to make your shoes smell better. And I’m, I’ve heard that some companies actually put it in your underwear to make well, you know, carbon is used everywhere because the advantage and the function of carbon are incredible for taking out tastes and odors from water, from the air, and many local councils use it in their treatment process.
So how does carbon work? Carbon functions through a process called adsorption. That’s not what a sponge does. A sponge works through a process called absorption with a B. If I put the sponge in water, the water runs up into the pores of the sponge. But when I squeezed the spot. Well, water runs right back out.
Well, that’s different from what carbon does. Carbon works, through a process called adsorption. And that is kind of like adhesive or it’s like Velcro. So when organics bond with the surface area of carbon, it sticks. I can squeeze it. I can twist it. It’s not coming off. And that’s how carbon is so good at getting rid of the things that cause taste and odor.
So, where does carbon come from, I hear most of our clients ask. Carbon is derived from a variety of sources in the water filtration business primarily from coconut shells, wood, or from two minutes coal. We don’t use by two minutes coal quite as much these days because there have been arsenic trace elements of arsenic found in the mining process of bitumen coal.
Coconut shell is, is widely used for a couple of reasons. It is a very renewable resource, and two, it lends itself very well to water filtration, and wood products. They’re used, but not quite as much in our business carbon filters come in various forms. They come in a granular form, which gives us the advantage of flow rate.
A granular carbon filter has just like, it sounds granular carbon inside. The beauty of that is water can flow through that without a lot of resistance. What is a carbon block? And this one has a little more capacity than the granular because we’ve ground it down to a fine natural green of carbon, but because it’s in a block form, the water flow has some resistance.
So the water flow is a little bit restricted as opposed to a granular one. But we gain a lot more surface area. So the capacity of a block is quite a bit higher than a granular filter in the same configuration. From there, we go to a radio flow carbon, which is kind of a mix between the two, typically a granular filter.
The water has to flow all the way to the bottom and up through the media, inside the cartridge. And it flows out the top where a carbon block is. But water flows through the media all the way down. This is called radial flow. We’ll imagine if we can create a filter that combines the granular capacity and floor rate benefits of granular with the radio flow of a block.
This gives us a lot more capacity than a typical granular, and it gives us a four-rate benefit. Now, this is only available in a Whole House Water Filtration System, but it has so many advantages over the standard configurations. So carbon one is the first ground that has a certain amount of surfaces. And then, we go through an activation process by using heat or steam that opens up the pores of that carbon granule. One gram of activated carbon actually has 500 to a thousand square feet of surface area. That’s enormous. And the finer you grind the carbon, the more surface area is created.
Particular capacity would be like the parking lot down at the mall, but it’s only got one floor. Now we’re going to add in the grind. Even finer, and we’re going to compress it into a block, we’ve just added about four floors to that parking structure and expanded the capacity. The interesting thing about carbon capacity, however, is it has only so many parking spots.
So if like at Christmas time, when you go to the mall, and you drive around and around and around and never find a place to park, will you pull back out on the street and go on about your business? The same thing happens with cars. If, if all of the surface areas are exhausted, and there’s a car parked in every one of those spaces, the stuff you’re hoping to filter out will travel right on through.
So it’s imperative with carbon capacity that you make sure you change the filters in your Jila Water Whole House Water Filtration System, or you change the media before it runs full of material. So, what is it that carbon can remove from water? Well, it’s a pretty big list. Carbon takes care of things that are organic in nature are things like volatile, organic compounds. The biggest one is chlorine. Carbon is used more widely for Cory reduction than anything else. Now, a lot of local councils have started to go to Cora mean for disinfection. Well, it takes a little bit more contact time with the carbon. Chloramines out of the core mean there is a chlorine ammonia compound. And it takes a long time with carbon to separate that so that they can get each independent element out.
So we use a product called catalytic carbon and this carbon. Like a coating on it, that enhances the adsorption function. And it’s really good for getting out chloramines, but the list goes on for carbon filtration, volatile, organic compounds, a lot of chemical things that get put in the water from pesticides or herbicides fall into those lists.
That carbon is a Filter media to get rid of those things. Now there are some things that carbon on its own will not get out. For example, Wed, it takes a little bit of a blended material blended in with the carbon to reduce, let, and will. As long as that formula is in there, they can be quite good at getting led out of the water.
Uh, things like arsenic, not so much dissolved inorganic minerals. Not so much, those things saw a sail right through the carbon without any reduction whatsoever, but carbon on its own can do so much. It does a lot, but to get out certain other elements that fall into the mineral category, it needs a little help.
And that comes in a, in a manner of a blend that goes in with the carbon. A carbon filter typically does not make a good sediment filter and sediment. It doesn’t have anything to do with taste Notre reduction. So if you have a sediment problem, you will also find our Whole House Water Filtration Systems uses a sediment filter to protect your carbon so that the carbon capacity can get used up the way it’s supposed to.
Granular filters don’t act as good sediment filters either. Um, a whole house carbon up-flow carbon or a backwash and carbon is going to have about a mesh of 25 microns. It’ll capture some dirt and debris, but that’s not a good purpose. That’s not the best application for carbon. So, where do I use carb?
It’s all over the place. Carbon is used in every reverse osmosis system we sell and also, of course, our Whole House Water Filtration System. Residential that is carbon is used in Whole House Water Filtration System. Carbon is used standalone in some of our client’s homes. There are a variety of places to use the carbon filter, uh, the refrigerator door or the refrigerator filter.
So all over the place, we’re using carbon to filter drinking water., the little filter in the cheap pitcher you buy from Bunnings will also have carbon. When used in a system like reverse osmosis, or a Whole House Water Filtration System, it’s doing multiple things is getting rid of chemicals. It’s getting rid of chlorine to protect downstream like reverse osmosis is protected that.
If the membrane sees chlorine, it’ll get destroyed. So the carbon plays a big, big role in that type of a system in a USF system, or Whole House Water Filtration System the carbon is doing a couple of things. It’s helping get rid of chlorine to protect the membrane. It’s also where lead gets reduced. As some of these systems are rated for led reduction.
That carbon is doing that with the blend that, that additive. And then the ultrafiltration membrane, which is typically a tiny little hole of fiber, kind of like a microscopic noodle, that’s going to mechanically filter all of the dirt and debris that gets down to 0.02, five microns. So carbon is used with a conjunction in all kinds of different systems, almost across the board in Waterfield.
The Carbon filters in our Whole House Water Filtration System are incredibly effective at the taste and odor reduction with additives. They can get involved with some other materials, some other minerals, or chemicals. But the question is, how often do I replace them? How long do they last? You should always replace them at least once a year. And here’s why the carbon with all of its parking places are collecting these organics.
And over time as those parking places, Once they get occupied. There’s going to be a time when there’s no more place for an organic to set down, and it could possibly start to break pieces off that had been parked there for quite some time. And the end result of that is that you have water coming out of that filter.
That’s actually worse than the water going. So it’s very important that carbon filters get replaced on an adequate basis and that an adequate basis is going to be based on several variables so please speak to our water techs about your Brisbane home needs.
And that’s really the pro and con look at carbon filtration that’s found in our Whole House Water Filtration System. The pro is it does enormous, wonderful things to reduce tastes and odors. The con is if you don’t replace it adequately enough about every 12 months. So each application can present its own calculation on how long a filter should last.
As always should you have any other questions or would like to have us come and test your home’s water, please book a free water test today from our website
