APEC Water Systems Reverse Osmosis-90 Ultimate Series

While reverse osmosis (RO) filters tend to get the limelight, but they aren’t necessarily the best filters to go with. Depending on your living situation, you might prefer carbon filtration, sediment filtration, or all-in-one, whole house filtration systems. The perks of each are explained below.

Ok, so how does RO actually work? Simply put, it forces water at incredibly high pressures through several membranes, with the finest ones only having meshes that are .0000002 microns thick. To give you an idea, RO systems like the APEC Water Systems RO-90 Ultimate Series can even filter out things like radium and arsenic.

The downside of RO filters is they tend to get pretty expensive to buy and maintain. Even going with something like the iSpring RCC7, which is considered one of the cheapest higher-end RO filters, you’re still looking at well over $175, and then another $35 or so for their replacement cartridges.

Also, another issue is that RO filters aren’t super-efficient, with anywhere between 25%-50% of the water that goes in being wasted. That means that RO filters are also slow, which is why most of them come with an internal tank so you can get water immediately when you need it. 

That being said, RO filters really are the best when it comes to water purity, and are ideal if the water that you get in your home has a lot of contaminants.

If you’re less worried about bacteria and are more interested in removing calcium, magnesium, and other minerals (that’s the white buildup you might see around your faucets) then carbon filtration might be the choice for you. Not only are they much faster in terms of water filtration (removing the need for a tank) they’re also much more efficient with a 100% filtration rate.

Even better is that the higher-end ones like the Frizzlife Under Sink Water Filter won’t even put you over a hundred bucks, and the replacement cartridges are equally cheap at around $20 a pop! Of course, I do want you to keep in mind that even a high-end filter like this isn’t incredibly fast, although it still outpaces RO filters.

Another great thing about carbon filters is that if you don’t have a bunch of space under your sink, you can get yourself an in-line filter like the Omnipure K2333 (quite a name, am I right)? The K2333 is an in-line carbon filter, and that basically means that it acts as part of the piping, and doesn’t really need its own space like any of the previous filters. It’s also only a fraction of the price, and funnily enough, the replacement cartridges are almost as expensive as the device itself!

This type of filter probably won’t apply to you if you live in the city, but if you live in the suburbs or out on a farm, sediment filters are truly essential, especially if you draw from a well.

So what does a sediment filter do? Exactly what it sounds like. 

Take our friend here the Rusco Screened Spin-Down Filter System, and what it does is remove sediment from any water that comes to your house. This is usually considered a pre-filter that tends to be added in the pipeline after a well pump but before an actual house filtration system. So if you notice sediment in your water, regardless of where you are, you’ll want one of these.

Unfortunately, sediment filters tend to be a little bit high-maintenance, although that certainly makes sense given that they often have to deal with a lot of muck and dirt. Thankfully, there are smaller sediment filters that are easier to maintain, like the iSpring WSP-100 – but it’s still quite a bit of work.

This one’s a bit of a bonus since it’s not so much a specific type of filtration, but rather a filter that has pretty much everything, from the sediment filter to the carbon filter, and even the unmentioned UV filter. While these tend to be quite the setup, like the Aquasana Whole House Well Water Filter System, they are probably the best solution if you just want all the fixin’s. 

Oh, and since they’re built for a whole house, they generally have a ton of capacity, so you won’t have to be capped by a specific bottleneck and need to wait forever for a tank to refill, or hope that you’re water pressure doesn’t get decimated with other filters like the carbon filter.

For example, the one whole-house filter mentioned above has a 500,000-gallon capacity, but if that’s not enough, you can give up the sediment filter (you can add it on your own later) and go for the Aquasana EQ-1000 Whole House Filter System, which has a whopping one million gallon capacity. You aren’t likely to be running out of water with that one!

That brings us to the end of our little water-filtration journey, but I will say before closing off that there are a few different types of filtration systems not covered here, like the UV filters I mentioned above, as well as fiber/ceramic filters, and related things like water softeners. These are a bit more niche and fall under specific product types though, so you shouldn’t worry about them too much, and are a topic for another article.

Albert is a freelance writer and the sort of person who takes the philosophy "jack-of-all-trades" to heart and is therefore just as comfortable rooting around with plumbing as he is inside his computer. He also loves fiction writing, and has even done some game writing in a couple of small mobile games, although he doesn't like to mention it or anything . . .